Year One News

Dear Year One families,

Welcome back, can you believe we are in the second week of Term Two!  We hope you had a wonderful break over the school holidays, celebrating the events special to you and your families. The Year One teachers were impressed with how quickly the children have settled back into their classroom routines and were ready to learn.

This term will be a busy one, building on what we have covered in Term One as well as introducing new concepts and strategies; here is an overview of some of what we will be learning over Term Two, as well as some of the skills and activities covered this first week.

Reading and Writing

We will be learning about non-fiction texts and the features which set them apart from fiction texts, as well as questioning and summarising. We will continue to build on handwriting and sentence structure as well as learning how to write an information report. Parts of speech, such as proper nouns, common nouns and spelling conventions will also be included in the term ahead.

This week we compared and contrasted fiction and non-fiction texts using a Venn Diagram – this helped the children understand the differences and similarities between the text types.

We also learned about Text-to-Text connections, this is where the reader makes a connection between two texts, the one they are currently reading (or have had read to them) with a text they have previously read. This is a good reading comprehension strategy that you could do at home when your child is doing their nightly reading or if you read a bedtime story to them. 

ANZAC Day

ANZAC Day falls on the 25th of April each year. The 25th of April was officially named ANZAC Day in 1916. 'ANZAC' stands for Australian and New Zealand Army Corps.  On the 25th of April 1915, Australian and New Zealand soldiers formed part of the allied expedition that set out to capture the Gallipoli peninsula. 

These became known as ANZACS and the pride they took in that name continues to this day. The meaning of ANZAC Day today includes the remembrance of all Australians and New Zealanders killed and wounded in all military 

operations. Through our Reading and Writing sessions the students learned about ANZAC Day and the reason why this is commemorated with red poppies. The use of mentor texts such as,  ‘ANZAC Ted’, are a gentle introduction to the sacrifices of war and conflict. 

Each class made a poppy wreath (or similar) to display in their classrooms. On Tuesday afternoon, we attended a special ANZAC day whole school assembly with a guest speaker from the RAAF. The Year One teachers were very proud of how the students conducted themselves and showed respect throughout the assembly.

Maths

There is often some confusion around the teen numbers and the numbers ending in ’ty’.  For example, saying thirty instead of thirteen. We will be working on this confusion in our daily maths warmups. Geometry will be a focus for this term, 2D shapes and 3D objects. We will also continue to develop student understanding of place value as well as addition and subtraction. We have started the term by learning about data and how to collect data using tally marks. The students came up with a question they could ask their peers, for example, ‘What is your favourite planet?’ – they then came up with a small list of choices that their peers could choose from. They interviewed their peers and collected the data. This data will be used in subsequent lessons to graph the data. 

Unit of Inquiry: Provocation Day

We began a new Unit of Inquiry (UOI) at the start of this term, related to the Transdisciplinary Theme, ‘How the World Works’. To generate excitement and interest for this Inquiry, the Year One teachers planned a ‘Provocation Day’ with interesting activities around this theme.  The children rotated through several different activities; a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) 

activity; the Fermi Paradox (due to the infinite 

nature of space, there is the potential for other life to exist on an Earth like planets in another galaxy/solar system); a video of the stars and galaxies which generated great discussions 

about the stars as well as a related activity; and an activity using flour, cocoa and rocks

 to represent meteors hitting the moon and creating craters.

Homework

Daily/nightly reading, please complete the yellow reading diary - this can and should include any books read on Reading Eggs, PM Readers, Epic and any other books of interest read– please contact your child’s teacher if you do not have the login details for these applications. Readers are changed weekly, please check with your child’s teacher for their chosen day to change readers over. Ensure students bring them back to change on their specific day.

Spelling homework should be done daily/nightly and returned every Friday for the weekly spelling test and to be given new words.

Requests

If possible, could every family please donate a box of tissues to their classroom. As you can imagine we go through a lot of tissues with 20+ children in each classroom. We are also coming up to the ‘sniffle’ season and therefore will go through even more tissues. Adding a box of tissues to your weekly shopping for use in your child’s classroom would be greatly appreciated by their teacher.

Thank you :)

General Reminders

• iPads are to be brought to school EVERY DAY, fully charged and with app/time limits off.
• RAT to be done twice weekly, Monday morning and Thursday morning.
• Any children who are ill or present flu like symptoms should not attend school. 
• If your child is absent, you must contact the school so that the reason for the absence can be recorded on the roll.
• Lessons begin at 8:30, Late arrivals after 8:40 must get a late pass from the office.
• Mornings are a difficult time for the teacher to chat with you regarding your child, please make an alternative time for these discussions to take place.                

           We look forward to continuing to work                     with you in Term Two,

            Regards, 

            The Year One Team