Glen Waverley Primary School Level 1 Newsletter

Level 1 - Term Three

Welcome back to another term of learning at Glen Waverley Primary School. We further extend our welcome to newly joined families that have recently joined our community. The Level One learners, have started back at school with excitement as they reconnected with their friends and teachers with many stories to share. 

 

This term is filled with many highlights, such as the celebration of achievements through Student Led Conferences, as well as many exciting incursions and excursions throughout our Inquiry unit to explore the different places within the local community. 

 

On behalf of all the Level One Teachers, we thank our community for the ongoing support and look forward to seeing everyone.

 

YCDI

In Term Three, students will further develop the You Can Do It keys of persistence and resilience.  The focus will be on developing student's metacognition by deepening their understanding of the Learning Intention and Success Criteria.  Through unpacking ‘The Beach’ analogy, students will explore the Success Criteria stages Surface Acquisition, Surface Consolidation, Deep Acquisition and Deep Consolidation. They will learn how they can move freely through or ‘dive into’ each of the stages during their learning journey.  To complement this learning, students will create personalised images and symbols to align with the Solo Taxonomy Verbs. Students will then apply this knowledge to co-create Success Criteria during lessons.  Additionally, students will continue to build their ‘Growth Mindset’ to apply to the stages of the Success Criteria to persevere with their challenge to overcome struggle. 

 

How to support your child at home:

  • Ask them about what stage of the Success Criteria they were in for their favourite lesson for the day. 
  • What struggles did they face in learning? How did they overcome this?
  • Ask them if they moved through the stages of the SC. (Surface Acquisition, Surface Consolidation, Deep Acquisition, Deep Consolidation)
  • Ask them to explain the difference between Surface and Deep Learning.

Reading

As we move into Term Three, the Level One students, will continue to use the CAFÉ reading program. They will become more familiar with the CAFÉ strategies such as ‘Make a picture or mental image’ and ‘Recognise literary elements (genre, plot, character, setting, problem/resolution, theme)’. The learners will be exploring fiction texts as we will be creating narratives. The learners will set new individual reading goal during reading lessons with their teacher. This allows them to focus on a reading area they would like to improve upon, such as building on their reading fluency through the goal, ‘Read with expression.’ The learners will be building upon their reading habitats during our library and Sustained Reading sessions. 

 

How to support your child at home:

  • Eg. Read for 10 to 15mins with your child each night and ask them to tell you want happened in the book. Example- What was the main problem and solution of the story? How would you describe the main character? Where is the story set?
  • Ask questions, make predictions, summarise, identify key features of their take home reader books. (title, subheadings, page numbers, characters, problem/solution)
  • Ask your child to explain the events that occurred in the beginning, middle and end of the reader book.
  • Support your child to identify and understand the key features of a narrative (characters, setting, plot, problem/solution).
  • Ask your student to describe the physical and personality traits of characters within their stories. 

Writing

In Term Three, the Level One learners will continue to consolidate their writing skills using our whole school approach of the VOICES strategies. The learners will be focusing on writing fictional stories as they explore the theme of narrative writing. Early in the term, they will be focusing on the VOICE strategies: “There is a clear beginning, middle and end” and “My words give my writing punch and pizzazz”. This helps students understand the structure of a narrative by starting with the introduction of the character and setting before unpacking the evolving problem and a solution. In addition, learners will be experimenting with adjectives to describe characters’ physical appearance and personality and the setting of the narrative to engage the reader. Students will continue to choose their individual writing goal and be supported through personalised group and individual conferencing to deepen their understanding. Learners will also further build upon their Sustained Writing habits, as they work on increasing the length of time that they can write and edit for.

 

How to support your child at home: 

  • Practice sustained writing at home, by having your child write something that they have enjoyed with the focus on adding adjectives to describe people, places and objects. 
  • Encourage your child to use newly learnt words in their writing to increase their vocabulary. 
  • Encourage your child to read over their writing to edit for spelling, punctuation and fluency.
  • Support your student with synonyms to create interest in their writing. I.e swap saw for gazed. 

Spelling

This Term, students will be applying spelling inquiry to their personalised spelling words. During the spelling inquiry process, they will identify various parts of the word, such as vowels and consonant sounds in words, the syllables, as well as the meaning of the word. They will explore words that they want to spell, and find both synonyms and antonyms for those words. Students will also utilise resources such as dictionaries to assist in their spelling inquiry. 

 

How to support your child at home:

  • Encourage your child to pick personalised words from books that they are reading from. E.g. Home readers. 
  • Ask your child to identify the vowels and consonants in different words. 
  • Say your personalised spelling words and identify each syllable. 

Speaking and Listening

Throughout this term, students will be able to practice, rehearse and perform a variety of short plays, building upon their skills from last term. They will be focusing on presenting classic and twisted fairytales to support them with their narrative writing ideas. They will be exposed to a mix of different story plots and different personality traits of traditional characters. The learners will continue to develop their collaborative and oral language skill set such as turn taking and organisation.   

 

How to support your child at home: 

  • Encourage your child to learn their lines for their twisted fairytales. How can they speak clearly? Can you include body language and expression to engage your audience?

Mathematics 

During Term Three, students will begin by consolidating and building upon the addition and subtraction strategies they learnt in Term Two. They will continue to explore subtraction and how it is linked to addition. Students will utilise the essential strategies of number bonds, friends of ten, doubles and near doubles, partitioning and the jump strategy to do so, deepening their mathematical thinking in the process.

 

Students will then explore Multiplication and Division, with a focus on the concept of ‘groups of’, arrays and transferring their knowledge of repeated addition and subtraction. They will utilise concrete, pictorial and abstract strategies to develop flexibility and confidence. There will be a strong emphasis on the importance of explaining their thinking and justifying their chosen strategy.

 

During our Money and Financial Mathematics unit, students will further transfer their knowledge of the four operations through exploring Australian currency and its value. They will use skip counting, addition and subtraction to a calculate the total of value of a collection of Australian coins and experiment with using money in financial situations.

 

Additionally, students will focus on Location by following and giving directions using specific mathematical language. They will transfer this knowledge to write and program directions to the Dash robots. 

 

For the final unit of the term, students will explore Chance and the mathematical language used to describe the probability of an event occurring.

 

How to support your child at home: 

  • Exploring flexible ways to make numbers from 1-10. E.g., 8 is ‘double 4’ and ‘four groups of 2.’ It can also be ‘3 + 5’ or ‘1 +7’. 
  • Discussing where the four operations are used at home.
  • Exposing them to Australian currency and the cost of items while shopping.
  • Asking them to give you directions on how to get to familiar places or around the house.
  • Discussing the probability of familiar events happening in any given day.

Inquiry

Through the lens of, ‘How can we connect to different places?’, students will explore elements of the local community. They will create links to the places they are from, and investigate the importance of connection. Visits from the local Fire Department, Police Station and Monash City Council will support students to build an understanding of the roles and responsibilities of important members within the community. Students will form connections with people at a local retirement village through writing letters and sending short videos. They will immerse themselves in the community by taking a tour of the local shopping center where they will speak to staff from a supermarket, bank and post office. As they deepen their knowledge of the places within the community, they will create 3D models of the places they have connected to within their local community. Each week, as they continue to deepen their knowledge of the community, they will have the opportunity to create a model of these places from recycled materials to demonstrate their new connection. As these models develop, students will make connections to the Global Goal: 9. Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure by discovering what a place needs and must have. Additionally, students will investigate how technology such as phones and emails, helps us to connect to people and places around the world – especially to the retirement village!

 

How to support your child at home:

  • Conversations about places (banks, supermarkets, chemist, florist, doctors,) in the community that you visit. Why are these important? Why do you visit these places? Why do you go there?
  • Discuss your job and then jobs of family members with child.
  • Collect recyclable materials, wood, scrap, brochures, logos and anything useful for 3D models of the community.