Year 1/2 

Wrinkled Hearts

Last week was Bully No Way week. We explored how we need to think before we speak. We first designed our own hearts with bright colours to represent what happens to our hearts when we are given encouragement, kind words or helping actions. Everyone was so impressed with their designs that they didn’t want anything to ruin them. We listened to a book that had a cactus who was using a fighting voice and every time these unkind words were voiced the students had to scrunch up their hearts a little bit. Once the book was finished, students didn’t really like that their beautiful hearts were “ruined”. We talked about how these unkind words can really impact our hearts. We tried flattening them back out, but it took a long time to mend and found that they never went back to the same perfect looking heart. We now know we need to think before we speak, to use kind words and actions because you never know how words can impact someone. 

Maths

In maths, students have begun learning about multiplication. To understand the idea of ‘groups of’, we have explored the meaning of the ‘x’ or ‘times’ symbol; used materials to represent multiplicative situations; created arrays; looked at repeated addition; and considered the idea of commutativity (2x5 gives the same answer as 5x2). 

We have been developing our understanding of location. Students have observed and created maps from a bird’s eye view. They have also designed and participated in obstacle courses, ensuring to give detailed directions using key vocabulary like left/right, clockwise/anticlockwise, behind, between, opposite etc.

Literacy 

This week students have been focusing on persuasive texts. We have explored persuasive texts with our reading, identifying the author’s opinion as well as writing our own persuasive pieces. When writing our own persuasive texts, students have been able to identify their opinion about the topic and give 3 reasons as to why they believe that. Along with our writing, students have been learning about for and against statements. Moving forward students will be exposed to more examples where they will explore persuasive vocabulary and the structure of these types of texts (opening sentence, 3 reasons with an example, closing sentence).