Our Weekly Year One Newsletter of concepts and happenings

Hi everyone,

Here is an update on our Inquiry concept development, what's on and how you can help.

Inquiry Concept Development:

Our Inquiry questions at present are:

What is happiness?

Is happiness the same thing to everyone?

Is happiness the same thing to adults as it is to children?

How do we know we are happy? Can we be happy in different ways at different times?

How can we improve our happiness and the happiness of others?

We are investigating happiness because if we want to make positive personal change to improve the happiness of ourselves and others, we need to know what makes people happy!

This Inquiry is developing through projects that occur during Learning Agreement. Our current projects are Performance Project, Music Project and Shop Design Project. 

The performance group is learning about how to express the concept of happiness through a play that they will develop collaboratively. 

The music group is developing songs using instruments, digital music and vocals to express the concept of happiness.

The Shop Design group is currently making scale models of what will become the Happy Shop and they will construct the shop that our happy products will be sold in. 

During Learning Agreement, there are target groups run by one teacher and Learning agreement involves the rest of the children either working in their project group if it is on that day, or working independently on other activities like making products for the happy shop and writing their procedural text etc. 

THANK YOU TO THOSE PARENTS WHO HAVE BEEN COMING IN TO TALK ABOUT WHAT HAPPINESS MEANS TO THEM. If you are interested in coming in to speak with the children at 9.10am one morning, please book a morning with Simone. 

We will be collecting the data from you as adults as well as surveying each other on what makes us happy so that we can display our data and make some conclusions around the questions above. 

Please write your response to the question: "What makes you happy? Is it the same for you as an adult as it was for you as a child?" in your child's Reader's and Writer's Notebook so they can share with the neighbourhood. 

HOW YOU CAN HELP:

In Number: 

Please continue to practice counting and number skills with your child at home. Ask them different ways to make a number (part, part, whole) i.e. 5 is a 4 and a 1, a 3 and a 4, a 5 and a 0 etc. 

Practice making numbers in different ways on a tens frame. Flash tens frames to your children to develop their concept of ten and building on from ten using two tens frames together.  

For our Inquiry:

We need helpers for:

•  performance workshops (developing a play storyline, dialogue, acting skills, body language, expression, set and prop design later on etc)
• Shop Construction (when the models are complete, we will need helpers to construct the shop)
• Music development (writing lyrics, instrument use)

For our Mini Projects:

We need helpers for:

• Science helpers: any parents who can teach us something about matter (solids, liquids, gasses). We have a dad coming to teach us about dry ice in a couple of weeks! exciting!
• Gardening helpers
• Animation helpers

For Literacy:

• Please encourage your child to write in their Reader's and Writer's notebook a few times per week. They might like to write about what happiness means to them and discuss how what makes them happy is different to what makes you happy as a parent.

LOST PROPERTY:

Please check the lunch tubs in the hallway to see if your child's hat, jumper, lunchbox is inside. We will be sending items to the main lost property in the Gym foyer every Friday. 

Thanks everyone,
The Year One Neighbourhood Team