Year 1, Term 4 - 2024

Welcome to Term 4 2024. 

We are looking forward to a successful, productive and exciting term.

Literacy

PHONICS: Year 1 students will complete the Level 6 sequence of sounds and begin to learn the morphology of words by exploring the suffixes -ing, -ed, -s and -es. They will consolidate their knowledge and skills in recognising and using different spelling choices for long vowels. 

SPELLING: Year 1 students will continue to take home spelling words that they have been taught explicitly. We will explore spelling words that connect to the long vowels, r-controlled vowels and suffixes learnt in Phonics and practise them throughout the week to use these words fluently in our writing. To support your child with their spelling, please encourage them to practise every night. 

READING: Year 1 students will be introduced to poetry by exploring acrostic and haiku poems. They will continue to build on their decoding and fluency strategies when reading; exploring texts to develop comprehension skills such as searching for information and summarising; as well as beginning to make inferences. Students will continue to explore how nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are used in sentences. 

WRITING: Year 1 students will engage in writing various texts this term; including, acrostic and haiku poems,  procedural text for instructional purposes e.g writing out a recipe as well as being introduced to writing a persuasive text. They will consolidate their editing skills in reading back their writing and recognising changes to improve meaning, spelling and punctuation. 

Numeracy

Year 1 students will review place value through reading, making, writing and ordering numbers as well as showing numbers grouped into hundreds, tens and ones. Students will consolidate their skills in counting forwards and backwards from 0 -100 and will practise skip counting to 100 by 10's, 5's, 2’s and 3’s from any given number. Students will apply these understandings when solving equations and worded problems using the operations of addition and subtraction and division with sharing. Using money students will focus on identifying and ordering Australian coins. Students will also consolidate their skills in recognising, making and continuing patterns with objects. Students will use a variety of hands on materials to measure the length of objects. 

We encourage parents to support their children’s Mathematical learning by practising quick addition and subtraction facts and using maths in real life situations, for example, using small amounts of money at shops and working out change, weighing items when cooking, etc. Children can continue to practise skills using their Mathletics account. A fun and engaging activity for families to explore is the Victorian Maths Challenge site found at https://www.education.vic.gov.au/about/events/vmc/Pages/default.aspx

Inquiry Topic: From Our Place to Outer Space

During Term 4, students will integrate their learning across Geography and Science to explore the world and universe around them. They will investigate maps and topography and engage in orienteering with compasses to explore the lands that our school is built on. They will learn about suburbs, state, country and the continents of the world and begin to develop their knowledge of the patterns of events that occur on Earth and in the sky, for example, the appearance of the moon, stars and planets at night. Students will be introduced to the concept of scale as they learn about the hierarchy of scale by which places are defined - locally and globally. 

Problem Solving 

Problem Solving lessons will continue this term. Students will continue to develop their understanding of how  to apply different strategies to solve worded mathematical problems. The strategies they will learn include: Guess and Check, Make a Table, Act it Out, Draw a Picture / Diagram, Find Keywords, Work Backwards and Find a Pattern. They will continue to use CUBES (Circle the numbers, Underline the question, Box the key words, Eliminate what you don’t need, Solve and check your answer) to support their understanding of a worded problem. 

Wellbeing:

In Term 4 we will continue to participate in several ‘Resilience, Rights and Respectful Relationships’ lessons that will work on improving the student’s overall Wellbeing. “Research shows that students who participate in rigorously designed and well taught social and emotional learning programs demonstrate more positive social behaviour, are less likely to engage in risky and disruptive behaviour, and show improved academic outcomes.”

Hayleigh Dunn - J8

Nicole Pearson - J9

Scott Gardner - J10

Year 2, Term 4 - 2024

Welcome to Term 4 2024. 

We are looking forward to a successful, productive and exciting term.

Literacy

PHONICS: In Phonics this term, the Year 2’s will be revising sounds covered throughout the year and the sequence. We will also continue learning about different suffixes in our morphology lessons. In Term 4 we will continue to learn suffixes such as ‘ly, less and ful’ and prefixes including ‘un and re’. 

SPELLING: Each week, students will continue to take home their spelling words that have been taught explicitly to the students every Monday. We look at spelling words that have a common sound with irregular spelling and practise spelling them throughout the week to ensure we are more fluent spellers when it comes to writing. To support your child with their spelling, please encourage them to practise every night. 

READING: Students will continue to revise and build on their decoding and fluency strategies. They will continue developing their comprehension skills such as predicting, making connections, inferences and analysing texts whilst reading. We will be concentrating when reading our chapter books and will work directly with a teacher to understand how to answer written questions in preparation for NAPLAN next year. 

WRITING: Students will continue to explore writing Persuasive texts and will review the text structure for writing a Narrative story. When writing a Narrative text students will investigate the ways authors use language and images to create characters and create pieces of writing using pictures as their prompt. They will begin to investigate how to hook a reader at the beginning of their stories as well as using dialogue within their stories.  

Numeracy

In Term Four, students will focus on identifying and ordering Australian coins and notes. We’ll continue to explore calculators and how they can assist us to repeat steps in calculations. We will then move onto developing questions in order to collect data via tally marks, lists and tables and then represent this data through graphs in our Statistics and Probability focus. 

In Measurement and Geometry, we will use a variety of hands on materials to measure objects for their mass, volume and capacity. This is always a favourite focus area for students as it provides great opportunities to get outdoors in the sunshine and use everyday objects. Although calendars have been used in daily routines in the classroom throughout the year we will be exploring the seasons, months of the year and how a calendar helps us to organise this information at the end of the term. Continuing our learning in Measurement and Geometry, students will be learning to read and describe the features on simple maps. During our fluency sessions each day, we will revise concepts of time, fractions and the four operations, (addition, subtraction, multiplication and division) all areas previously learnt this year. 

We encourage parents to support their children to understand maths by practising times tables and quick addition and subtraction facts and using maths in real life situations. At home, parents can support their children using small amounts of money at shops and working out change, weighing items when cooking and comparing items for their size/shape and capacity. A fun and engaging activity for families to explore is the 99 Maths site found at https://99math.com/ . 

Inquiry Topic: From Our Place to Outer Space

During Term 4, students will integrate their learning across Geography and Science to explore the world and universe around them. They will investigate maps and topography and engage in orienteering with compasses to explore the lands that our school is built on. They will learn about suburbs, state, country and the continents of the world and begin to develop their knowledge of the patterns of events that occur on Earth and in the sky, for example, the appearance of the moon, stars and planets at night. Students will be introduced to the concept of scale as they learn about the hierarchy of scale by which places are defined - locally and globally. 

Problem Solving 

Problem Solving lessons will continue this term. Students will continue to develop their understanding of how  to apply different strategies to solve worded mathematical problems. The strategies they will learn include: Guess and Check, Make a Table, Act it Out, Draw a Picture / Diagram, Find Keywords, Work Backwards and Find a Pattern. They will continue to use CUBES (Circle the numbers, Underline the question, Box the key words, Eliminate what you don’t need, Solve and check your answer) to support their understanding of a worded problem. 

Wellbeing:

In Term 4 we will continue to participate in several ‘Resilience, Rights and Respectful Relationships’ lessons that will work on improving the student’s overall Wellbeing. “Research shows that students who participate in rigorously designed and well taught social and emotional learning programs demonstrate more positive social behaviour, are less likely to engage in risky and disruptive behaviour, and show improved academic outcomes.”

The Year 2 Team:

Paul Leslie (J11)

Bree Brown(J12)

Mikkea Denniston- Spaull (J13)