This week our Year 1s have been learning Los Saludos – greetings in Spanish.

Here are some of our students singing the greetings and also the Spanish greetings song for children to listen to and perform for you at home!

This week we entered a very special time of the Liturgical Calendar called Lent. This is a 40 day season that begins on Ash Wednesday and ends at sundown on Holy Thursday. It is a time of preparation to celebrate the Resurrection of Jesus at Easter and is represented by the colour purple; a symbol of reflection, royalty and repentance.

On the last day before Lent begins, we celebrate a day called Shrove Tuesday, also known as Pancake Day. On this day, it is a tradition to eat pancakes. In the past, people were not allowed to eat foods such as eggs. To use these before Lent people would mix them with other rich foods such as milk, flour and butter to make pancakes.

This week in bookmaking, we are learning about the Australian author and illustrator Nick Bland.  Today was our immersion lesson where we explored Nick Bland books and noticed the ways he writes and illustrates.  Children named and noticed crafting techniques that Nick Bland uses such as BIG AND BOLD and onomatopoeia.

The video below shows us who Nick Bland is through a short clip of him accepting a children’s book award:

Check out our students reading Nick Bland books.  We then had a discussion and brainstormed what the students noticed about his books.

As a part of getting to know each other and building positive relationships with our students, we have shared a ‘teacher newsletter’ with the children of 1NP and 1SD.

Please feel free to have a read:

Happy twosday everyone!

Today we celebrated a very special moment in time, where the calendar date showed only 2’s: 22/2/22. This date is both a palindrome and an ambigram: the date reads the same from left to right, from right to left and upside down on a digital clock!

To celebrate the day we showcased the number 2 in various activities, including practising our skip counting by 2, working in partners and having a dance brain break at 2:22pm (when the time aligned with the calendar date). We also did a craft activity where we created twosday crowns. See our amazing work below!

This week our focus in numeracy has been on representing and recognising numbers up to 100. Children were given a random number between 11 and 99 and had to show the number value in numerals, words and one visual representation.

We have also explored subitising, which is the ability to immediately recognise numbers and their value.  Children have practiced this skill using dice, dominoes and playing cards.  They have recorded numbers and used simple addition. Keep up the great work Year 1s!

Happy Valentine’s Day everyone!

Today the children explored how Valentine’s Day highlights the Character Strength of Love. We discussed how love is a feeling and it presents itself in many different ways. We read ‘Love from the Crayons‘ to explore how love comes in many different colours, shapes and sizes. We also discussed the children’s ideas about love and how they can show love to those they care about:

Love is about sharing toys with others – Alyssa

Love is giving something to other people, like chocolates and bears – Kunal

Love is being kind, respectful, safe, using kind and good words – Mason

Love is taking turns and sharing – Noor

We show love for other people by being nice – Rex

We also spent some time creating cards for our loved ones to show them that we ‘love them to pieces’. 

This week in Numeracy students have been exploring how to name, count and order numbers from 0 – 100. Today, we practiced ordering numbers on a number line.

We have also practiced counting by 2, 5 and 10. We used 100’s charts to show our understanding.

Our focus this week has been on reading and bookmaking.  Children start each day in the classroom reading books they have chosen and have the opportunity to take part in our ‘Come Read With Me’ sessions.  We also explore shared reading experiences each day.

This morning the Year 1s were able to visit our class ‘Book shop’ where each child chose 4 books to add to their classroom book box.  These book boxes act as a class library for each student. These books are in addition to the books that each child borrows during our library sessions.  We love reading!

Bookmaking has been quite a success so far in our classes.  The children enjoy creating their own books as authors and illustrators.  Our focus has been on book orientation, including the features of a title page, writing tools we can use and how we read and write books from left to right.  Watch this space for some amazing book creations!