Yr1 Curriculum Update – 18/05/18
Working together to achieve success for every child
Greetings! – It’s our 18th edition!
We write a regular newsletter keeping you up-to-date and informed about your child’s learning. This will provide you with a good understanding of happenings in Year 1 and how you can support these learning experiences.
Transdisciplinary Learning – It’s all connected!
This week, the students have continued their learning journeys, inquiring into the central idea, ‘People’s choices can help or hurt the Earth.’ Personal inquiry time has provided students with lots of learning opportunities to question, explore and wonder, supporting their curiosity of how different choices can positively or negatively impact the Earth. Consequently, students have started to pursue their own interests and acquired the language research skills connected to locating information using pictures, books and IPADs.
When working with our Year 1 guest speaker Mara McCaffrey from the NGO Orangutan Aid, students were able to, for example, think critically and formulate questions. Students could seek further information into the different reasons Orangutans are listed as a critically endangered species in Asia and discuss conversation strategies to support their survival in the wild. This Year 1 message of the need to protect the Earth and accept responsibility with regards to the 6Rs, has also been shared with other members of the KJS community. Students were very excited to showcase their learning journeys during the lower primary assembly to their Year 2 & 3 friends.
Within Maths, students continue to solve addition and subtraction problems using different concrete materials and strategies. Part of this learning process involves supporting students’ understanding of how they can use these materials to apply different strategies to solve problems, record and communicate their thinking with pictures, diagrams, numbers and symbols.
Celebration of Learning
All parents are invited to the Year 1 Celebration of Learning taking place on Friday 25th May 2018 (1.45pm-2.30pm). Students will have the opportunity to showcase their learning journeys from the current unit ‘Sharing the Planet’ with you in their classrooms. The Celebration of Learning will commence in the school hall progressing to the Year 1 classrooms, ending at 2.30pm.
Y1 School Excursion
All students will visit Kadoorie Farm on Monday 28th May 2018 as a provocation for the start of the new Unit of Inquiry. Students will explore how living things and animals are classified in special groups (e.g. reptiles, amphibians, etc). If you are interested in volunteering, please contact you children’s classroom teacher by Monday 21st May 2018. All parent volunteers will be required to attend a mandatory safety briefing that day from 8:15 – 8:30am on the day of the excursion.
Suggestions for supporting learning at home
Discuss the possibility of becoming Orangutan guardian with your child.
http://www.orangutanaid.com/howcanyouhelp/guardianship.html
Create a maths rich learning environment at home to support your child’s attempt at solving addition and subtraction problems
https://sleepingshouldbeeasy.com/2017/06/13/create-a-math-rich-environment-at-home/
Tuesday 22nd May
Buddha’s birthday (no school)
Friday 25th May
Y1 Sharing the Planet Celebration of Learning
Monday 28th May
Y1 school excursion to Kadoorie Farm
Photo Stories
We hope that the pictures we add to our curriculum update each week will help you to make connections to the information shared above and to give you an insight into our week in Year 1
