Ulysses 

Welcome to The Ulyses Community Newsletter. This is the first newsletter of the term, and to kick things off, we have seen great adaptation on the students’ part. We have now arrived at the middle of term three and are amazed at the academic excellence portrayed by our students.  We have organised a couple of events this term, including 100 days of grade one and Book Week. Once again, we aspire to a great rest of the term for our students and hope they acquire a wealth of knowledge throughout this term.

Reading 

This term in Phonics Plus, our Grade One learners have been working hard to build their reading and spelling skills. We have been exploring sounds, blends, and Heart words through fun games, songs, and activities.

What we’ve been learning:

• Introduction of new GPC:
• Oral, reading and spelling components:
• Spelling patterns:
• Use ‘au’ at the start, middle and end of a word. Blending practice: Putting sounds together to read whole words.
• Segmenting: Breaking words apart to spell them.
• Dictation and choral Reading.

It’s wonderful to see the children becoming more confident readers and writers each week. Thank you for your ongoing support — it truly makes a difference!

We build strong and confident readers in our community by learning and practising various reading skills and strategies. These help children not only read the words on the page but also understand and enjoy what they read.

This term, our focus skills are:

• Decoding – sounding out unfamiliar words using phonics knowledge.
• Heart Word Recognition – instantly recognising tricky words without sounding them out.
• Predicting – using clues from the title, pictures, and text to guess what might happen next.
• Visualising – making a “mind picture” of the story to bring it to life.
• Questioning – asking questions before, during, and after reading to deepen understanding.
• Making Connections – linking the story to personal experiences, other books, or the wider world.
• Retelling – recounting the main events in order, using key details.

Writing

This term, we have been learning how to write information reports. These are texts that give facts about a topic, rather than telling a story. Students have been working on writing reports about animals and countries for a significant amount of time and have gained a strong understanding of their structure and requirements. These lessons are designed to consolidate their knowledge and encourage them to understand facts, enabling them to express their understanding.

What we are learning

• Purpose – to inform the reader about a topic.
• Structure –
  1. Title – tells the topic.
  2. Opening statement – introduces the subject.
  3. Facts – grouped into paragraphs.
  4. Conclusion – wraps up the information.

• Language features –

  1. Using the present tense (e.g., “Kangaroos live in Australia”).
  2. Using descriptive words for more detail.
  3. Using factual, not opinion-based, sentences.

   

In the coming weeks, we will shift our focus to narratives and their structure, how they are formatted/created. We will provide students with several visual stimuli to help motivate their stories and guide their approach to the story.

Maths

In Maths, we are exploring repeated addition — an important step towards learning multiplication. Repeated addition means adding the same number repeatedly to find the total.

What we are learning:

• Understanding that repeated addition is a quicker way of adding equal groups.
• Using pictures, counters, and arrays to represent repeated addition.
• Writing repeated addition number sentences, e.g.:
  • 2 + 2 + 2 = 6
  • 3 + 3 = 6
•  
• Connecting repeated addition to early multiplication facts.

📝 Home Reading

Please encourage your child to read for at least 10–15 minutes every day. This can be their take-home reader, a library book, or even reading with you from a favourite storybook.

 Tips for Supporting Reading at Home

• Ask your child questions about the story (Who? What? Where? Why?)
• Let them retell the story in their own words
• Praise their effort and celebrate small successes
• Model reading by letting them see you enjoy a book or magazine.

SEL

The Resilience Project is an SEL program that helps children build skills to support their mental health and well-being. Through fun, engaging lessons, we are learning how to be kinder, grateful, and mindful in our everyday lives.

Our key focus areas are:

• Gratitude – noticing and appreciating the good things in our lives.
• Empathy – understanding and caring about how others feel.
• Mindfulness – paying attention to the present moment and calming our minds.

In class, we have been:

• Sharing “something we’re grateful for” each day.
• Reading stories that help us understand other people’s feelings.
• Practising short mindfulness activities like breathing, listening to sounds, or focusing on one thing at a time.

• Inquiry

This term in our Inquiry unit, we are exploring the differences between living and non-living things. Students are becoming young scientists — asking questions, observing closely, and sharing their ideas.

What we are learning:

• Living things: grow, change, need food/water/air, and can reproduce.
• Non-living things: do not grow, change, or need food, water, or air.
• How to classify objects into living and non-living.
• Using scientific language, such as habitat, life cycle, and environment.

The Ulysses Team.