Year One News 

Hello, Year 1 families,

It was so great on Monday the 14th to see so many of our students dress up in the outfit of what they want to be when they grow up. Thank you to all those students and families who participated in this and donated to UNICEF. 

Saltwater College has also begun in helping to raise awareness of the Community Spirit Foundation by participating in Stride for Education 2022. The Community Spirit Foundation supports Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and their families within four remote communities in Australia to realise their potential through life-long learning. Every step we take is one step closer to supporting this work. Students are encouraged to get their steps up and walk to and from school where they can. Additionally, if parents would like they can donate through their class SchoolBox pages.  

Students have continued to work on their Unit of Inquiry centered around ‘Culture unites us as a community’. We have been learning about different celebrations in different communities and sharing our own cultural stories.  

Reading

We continue to learn about trigraphs, and understand that three letters come together to make one sound. Students have enjoyed finding them in words they are reading and writing. 

Students are reading different narratives and understanding that there is a conflict and a resolution. When reading ‘Jill and the Beanstalk’ students identified what went wrong in the narrative and how it was resolved. They also recognised the cause and effect of events in a story and shared this with their peers. Students are continuing to work on their summarising skills, and retell the text using a ‘somebody, wanted, but, so then’ strategy. It has been wonderful to see students mastering this skill and confidently sharing their narrative summaries with their class.

Writing

Students are loving the opportunity to write their own narratives and are exploring the features of a narrative. Students have planned their narratives and outlined their stories title, characters, setting, problem and the solution. They have been making excellent connections between the knowledge they are learning in reading and implementing this in their writing. It has been a great opportunity for students to explore and share their wonderful imaginations in their narratives.

Students also wrote about a cultural celebration that they celebrate in their lives. This relates directly to our unit of Inquiry and was amazing to read all of the different celebrations and traditions across the Year One cohort. 

Mathematics

In Mathematics students have concluded their learning about Volume and Capacity. It was exciting to see students explore the concept of full, half full and empty. Students enjoyed using water, sand and beads to investigate the capacity of different containers. 

Students are now exploring sharing and division, and learning about the concept of fair and unfair. Students have been challenged to make equal groups and solve simple division problems. Students are asking the question ‘is it fairly grouped, or are there any remainders?’

We are looking forward to exploring different strategies to solve division problems over the next few weeks.

Inquiry

As we are approaching the end of the term, students will soon be concluding their unit of inquiry on different cultures. Students will explore some more celebrations and traditions. Additionally, students have been taking action to support remote Indigenous communities by participating in the Stride for Education initiative.  

Reminders

• Mini-Olympics; students will be taking part in the P-2 Mini-Olympics on Wednesday 23rd November. Please make sure your student wears the correct colour top on the day.
• Green T-Shirt: Year 1A, B, C, D & F (This can be a green top from home)
• Blue T-Shirt: Year 1E, G, H, I & J  (The blue top can be their sports top as it is already blue).
• Christmas Carols; our songs and class dances are available on your class SchoolBox page and ready to rehearse at home leading up to the whole school Carols Performance.
• Please remember our weekly spelling as homework. Mathletics and Reading Egg's are also an expectation with students. In addition, student should be reading their take-home books every night at home. 

Kind regards,

The Year 1 Team