Welcome to Room 22

 

A Note from Mrs C

Welcome to Room 22 and Mrs C’s Year One Smarties. We have had a great start to the year, with all children settling in well. We have begun our collaborative learning teams and children are beginning to understand the roles they are to perform within their group to ensure it functions well. So far we have explored the role of the GoFor, a role everyone wants until they get it…the Gofor is the busiest person in the group.

In order to ensure we get to know each other well and learn all about collaboration, sharing and caring for all the members of our ‘family’ in Room 22, we have spent the afternoons (just before home time) in collaborative play. This time allows the children to form friendships and socialise. It has been not only a great success socially but also creatively as you will see below.

Thank you

A huge thank you to all the parents who attended the Parent Information Evening. I hope you found it informative and have forgiven me for making you participate in a Kagan activity. Your children were suitable impressed the next day. I appreciate you giving up your time to listen to important information to support your child through Year 1. As long as we work together as a team, we should see great results from all students. If you were not able to attend and have not received your Parent Pack, please see me for a copy.

Thank you also for your efforts in helping your children dress up for our Australia Day celebration to raise money for the Yarloop Bush fire Appeal. Everyone looked great!

English

We have jumped straight into Literacy learning this term with fast paced warm ups, Kagan strategies, guided reading, sentence building and writing. I am very impressed with the amount of effort everyone is putting in. I have already seen a huge improvement in the pace and recall of information.

You will have noticed your child coming home with their spelling folder and home reading folder. These were discussed at the Parent Evening, however if you have any queries please don’t hesitate to come and see me. I have advised the children to keep their folders in their bag at all times, this way they are not only always available should we need them, but create a good habit of being responsible for their homework.

One of the games we like to play when we have a few spare minutes before home time is Sight Word King/Queen. A child is chosen via a random selector tool on my iPad. They then get to dress up with the royal cape and a sceptre. The King/Queen then chooses someone to hide behind the whiteboard, they then point to a word. Everyone then sings for the person to return and ‘read a word for me’. This person then gets three chances to guess the correct word…a great way to learn our sight words and work as a team.

 A sincere thank you to all the parents who helped their child with their Talk Homework. I was impressed with the vocabulary you all came up with. The children loved sharing their words with the group and seeing how they could change our sentence from blah to WOW!

The winner of the best WOW word for this week was Neve with the word Scrumptious. Well done Neve!

Our new garden reading corner has been a hit also.

Mathematics

We have been using our maths time to practice the concepts taught in Pre-Primary through games. Games enable children to apply their knowledge to areas of problem solving and work collaboratively with their class mates. These sessions have provided a solid foundation on which to further build mathematical knowledge.

Word Problem Wednesday will commence next week. I will be sending the problems home on Tuesday afternoon in order to discuss and mark as a class on Wednesday. I thank you in advance for your support.

History

This term our focus is on families, how families can differ and how they have changed over time. The children could not believe my nanna was one of 14 children!

We will be exploring family trees, how life has changed since grandparents were children and how family heirlooms and photographs provide us with memories.

 I would like to take this opportunity to ask that each family provide their child with a family photo for us to explore in class. These photos will be returned at a later date. Thank you for your support.

Science

Once we have completed our unit on History we will begin our Science unit. The focus for this term is on living things (humans, animals and plants), how the parts help them move, grow and survive.

I have some interesting, fun things in store so stay tuned!