Grade 1 Term 3 Curriculum News

Dear Parents,

This Term Newsletter will provide you with information about your child’s upcoming teaching and learning experiences in the new term. There is also plenty of additional information provided via Compass throughout the school year, so please make a point of touching base regularly.

Welcome to Term 3! We hope that you enjoyed the winter break and managed to get away for a short holiday or simply enjoyed some family time at home. We are now past the halfway point in the year and the Grade 1 students are well and truly back into their learning, familiar with their routines and keen to put their best foot forward for Semester 2.

Reading

The Grade 1 classrooms have again enjoyed access to hundreds of high quality texts throughout the first semester and we look forward to swapping our classroom libraries so that students have access to fresh new books for the upcoming term. An early focus in the term will ensure that students have input into building our classroom libraries and choosing Just Right texts for their desk libraries. There will also be a focus on comprehension strategies this term to encourage students to think deeply about the texts they choose to read. We will be making text to self connections, text to text connections, predictions about the text and inferences about characters' feelings and motives. Take Home readers will continue this term and we encourage all students to follow the homework guidelines and read a minimum of four nights for at least 10 minutes weekly. Students are required to return their readers on a weekly basis so they can borrow books for the following week.

Writing

Independent Writing will continue to be a focus for the Grade One students this term. The students love choosing topics and writing about their interests. Throughout the term, students will have multiple opportunities to develop their handwriting skills and letter formation through explicit lessons. If parents would like to collect some handwriting resources to continue this learning at home, please contact your child’s classroom teacher to collect a simple pack with a few supportive materials. The students in Grade 1 will be given the opportunity to develop their ability to choose topics, build on familiar texts, plan effectively, rehearse sentences and write detailed first drafts before revising their work carefully to make improvements where possible. Students will be encouraged to reread their own writing and talk with others about making changes to improve the meaning, spelling and punctuation before producing a published piece of work.

Maths

In Maths, the Grade One team are excited to introduce a few new concepts this term as well as spend some valuable time consolidating understanding of topics covered in semester 1. To kick the term off, there will be a focus on solving simple addition and subtraction problems using a range of strategies. Students will then be introduced to basic fractions and the concept of sharing between a set of objects before exploring and classifying 2D and 3D shapes using language such as faces, edges and corners. Students will revisit and revise skip counting by 2’s, 5’s and 10’s as well as counting forwards and backwards by 1 from any given number. Measuring and comparing mass, capacity and length will also be covered as revision this term.

Inquiry

The Inquiry unit this term will focus on Seasons and Weather. Many hands-on and engaging lessons will provide students with the opportunity to learn about how weather can change throughout the day or the year. Students will be given the opportunity to identify features of weather within different seasons, observe weather patterns and discover how different locations experience different weather patterns and the impact that extreme weather can have on the way we live and our environment.

Each year level team has provided their families with a detailed newsletter such as this. If you are interested in reading about all the exciting things happening across the rest of the school, these can be accessed online at our school website from early next week.

Kind Regards,

The Grade 1 Team