Our Weekly Communication to you and copy of our timetable

Hi everyone,

Here's what's on in the Year One Neighbourhood this week.


Inquiry Concepts:

Our school-wide Inquiry is on change. Each neighbourhood is listening to the children's responses to provocations in order to direct the Inquiry in a way that is unique, connected and relevant to them. From initial conversation, the year one children identified change as related to natural changes in nature and humans (growth etc.) and changes that we can impact like our choices, our mistakes, our actions. 

This week our major concept within our Inquiry into change is How can you create positive personal change through your choices? 

Today we workshopped personal choices regarding our feelings through the Kimochis and we explored a song called "I Choose" by India Arie which talks about being true to yourself, being the best that you can be, letting go, and making your own decisions. 

Many of our learning agreement provocations have been designed for children to explore this concept further by developing a performance (song, dance, play, skit) and creating masks, storyboards, comics, lyrics, and garageband soundtracks to illustrate what they know about positive personal choices. The children are given many opportunities to explore these big ideas through writing, speaking and listening and reading. 

Change is also being explored through science plant growth experiments and through construction by repurposing recyclable materials. 

This week year four students will be coming to our neighbourhood to teach us how to podcast. We will use podcasting and video recording to record our feelings, opinions, reflections and for recording our reading.  

The children are exploring change in mathematics by looking at Australian money. Through this unit, the children will be targeted on their number counting skills, place value, number knowledge and number facts. Money provides a wonderful opportunity to apply skip counting by 5s and 10s and using strategies such as doubles and counting on from the higher number.

During Learning Agreement, one teacher will be taking a target teaching session with a small group of children. The timetable indicates on which days various aspects of the curriculum will be targeted.


What's On:

• Thursday 13th February, 5pm-6.30pm: Parent Information Evening in Gymnasium and neighbourhoods.

• Thursday 20th February, 6pm onwards: Welcome Picnic at Princes Park (near the playground) 

• Monday 24th February: 6pm onwards: Parent Information Evening MATHEMATICS with Dianne Siemon in Gymnasium.

How you can help: 

• It would be wonderful for families to have conversations with their children about how you have made positive personal changes to your lives whether it be through good choices when you have reacted to situations, or what you have learnt from poor personal choices, making big decisions that have helped you be true to yourself, making choices and changes to fix a mistake, etc. You might like to write in your child's Reader's and Writer's notebook for them to share your ideas with the neighbourhood.

• Because we are looking at money, ask your child if they can tell you what coins you could use to buy small items such as lunch order items, stationary, food etc. See if they can create the total amount of money using different combinations of coins. Help your child to count by 5s and 10s around the home or work on counting small collections of items and counting on from the larger number to develop the building blocks prior to skip counting. Your child could work on this in their Reader's and Writer's notebook. 

• Please speak with a neighbourhood teacher if you are interested in being a parent representative this year. 

See you during the week,
The Year One Neighbourhood Team :) T1W3 timetable