P-1 NEWS
Week 3
What a wonderful week we've had in Year P/1 ! In Science, the classroom was full of excitement as students planted their very own broad bean seeds. We discussed what plants need to grow and began setting up a routine to care for and observe them over the coming weeks—watching the changes will be a fascinating journey.
In History, we kicked off our new unit on families by talking about what makes a family unique and the special traditions or activities we enjoy together. It was heartwarming to hear students share stories and reflect on the important people in their lives.
A definite highlight of the week was our buddy session. Students worked thoughtfully to create a special gift in honour of their mums or other special carers.
Literacy
This week Prep students continued Stage 3 of the Little Learners Program, and learned the sound /e/, as in 'elf' and 'hen'. They met Milo's friend Eddy Elephant and at the end of the week, they created their own Eddy. Students also learned three new Heart Words, he, she, and we. This week students experimented with copying sentences to practice finger spaces and full stops.
Students listened to "We're going on a Bear Hunt" and chose a movement to write and draw in their books. It is exciting to see how many sounds they have learned and could write on their own. Many created sentences such as "The big bad bear is mad." They also sequenced events to show their understanding of the story.
Our Grade 1 students have made impressive progress this week in literacy. We focused on the ‘ar’ sound, as in star, scarf, and shark, exploring it through reading and word work activities. In handwriting, we continued refining our letter formation, with special attention to the letters r, x, and z—students are showing great improvement in both neatness and confidence.
We also practised our fluency reading with the decodable text Art Party, helping to build strong, expressive reading voices. In writing, students worked on adding more detail to their ideas. They proudly published their descriptive writing about an ‘angry monster’, and later tapped into their imaginations by creating their own stories inspired by a picture prompt as part of our ‘rocked writing’ session.
Numeracy
This week in Maths, our Prep students continued developing their skills in recognising and partitioning collections—this time extending their understanding all the way to the number 10. Using counters, students explored the different ways to break a group of 10 into two smaller groups, carefully recording each combination they discovered.
We also had fun with directional and positional language, completing an activity where students had to place pictures of different objects in the correct locations based on prompts like under, next to, on top of, and between. These activities help build spatial awareness and understanding of everyday language.
Grade 1 students practiced a variety of addition strategies early in the week and on Friday, employed the strategies they are most confident with to solve a variety of addition problems. They began matching visual problems with 4 options and worked together as a class to eliminate options and find the correct match. This will be continued with next week!
To round out our learning, both classes practised the months of the year through song and revisited some of our classroom favourites—the days of the week and counting to 100.
Have a wonderful weekend,
Louise, Juliet, and Maxine