Grade One Curriculum Newsletter

Dear families,

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 you simply enjoyed some family time at home. We are now past the halfway point in the year and our Grade One 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
This term, students will continue to engage in daily phonics instruction. Having now reached the halfway point of the year, students are exploring how to read longer words. We will be exploring a range of new spellings such as -ed (boxed), -es (boxes) and -ing (boxing). In the latter parts of the term, students will be learning how to read words with more than one syllable (com-pu-ter), as well as reading compound words (starfish, raincoat).

Each day, students will continue practising their decoding skills by reading aloud to a partner during our ‘Fluency Pairs’. This involves one student reading whilst their partner follows along, providing assistance and feedback before each pair switches roles. Following this, students will independently engage with a daily decodable passage which reinforces the morning’s learning.

Upon completion of our phonics lessons, students turn their attention to our daily comprehension focus. This term students are learning to develop their predicting, questioning, inferring and retelling skills to help them gain a deeper understanding of the texts they read.


Writing
Students will be exploring how to write a range of text types, including recounts, poetry, informative texts and narratives. At the beginning of a writing lesson, teachers will often use a picture story book, visual prompt or video to hook and engage students. Students will be taught how to use an existing story and make it their own by changing the characters, setting or plot, or alternatively, writing their own conclusions to known stories. They will also have the opportunity to engage in independent writing sessions where they are able to choose topics which interest them.

Each day, students will also engage in explicit grammar mini lessons that focus on developing their ability to write correctly structured sentences. Already, students have learned how nouns, pronouns and verbs are used within a sentence. Later in the term we will also be exploring the difference between statements and questions, past tense and present tense words (walk vs walked), as well as expanding simple sentences by using commas or conjunctions. Throughout the term, students will also develop their handwriting skills through daily instruction and practise.


Maths
In Maths, students will be introduced to a number of new concepts as well as consolidating their knowledge of topics covered in the first two terms of the year. This term, students have already revisited ‘place value’, where they were required to use their knowledge of hundreds, tens and ones to build numbers using a range of materials. Students have also revisited our measuring unit, ‘length’.

This term, students will also develop their abilities to skip count by 2s, 5s and 10s, explore a range of addition, subtraction and division problems through real-world examples, practise reading analogue clocks to the half hour, explore elapsed time problems as well as learn about the concept of ‘chance.’

Inquiry
This term’s Inquiry focus is ‘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, discover how different locations experience different weather patterns, as well as the impact that extreme weather can have on the way we live and our environment.

Later this term, we will be visiting Science Works. Students will enjoy an immersive experience in the planetarium, joining ‘Tycho’ as he travels to Mars, and exploring the night sky. Students will also be treated to a hands-on experience in the Lightning Room, where they will discover how water, air and heat create lightning, rainbows, clouds and rain. The show will finish with a lightning demonstration using a two-million volt Tesla coil and a discussion of safety in lighting storms. If you would like any further information around this excursion, or would like to volunteer as a parent helper, please visit Compass.

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.