Here is an update on what is happening in the Year One Neighbourhood.
Inquiry Concept Development:
The question driving our Inquiry is still 'what is happiness' but we are now moving toward the question "What can we do to bring happiness to others?". We are organising a time for a member of Clowns without Borders to come and share her experiences of working with sick children. We are also attempting to establish a relationship with the Royal Children's Hospital Education Institute to see if we can take some action to bring happiness in our own ways to the children who are ill. We are developing ideas and possibilities such as pen pals, video messages, hand made gifts and so on. We want to explore the different ways that we can bring happiness to others through acts of kindness, caring relationships as well as gifting and see what other means the children come up with.
The Happy Shop is almost ready, the children have been writing job applications for various roles including shop assistant, banker, stock inventory, visual merchandise, merchandise repairer etc.
The children will interview for these positions and have a roster for their work. Children will be able to purchase items in the store at various times. They can save their allowance or spend it, earn money if an item they made is sold, and take orders for a product that seems popular. The children will explore the use of money when shopping. They must provide at least enough money when purchasing an item and work on calculating change, they will get experience using a calculator to calculate daily sales and they will record prices and sales if they are a shop assistant.
The children in the shop model project group will be designing signs, catalogues and visual merchandising for the Happy Shop.
Children developing a performance have come up with script ideas and are collaborating to develop a message to their play and will start storyboarding in different ways to organise their scenes.
Children working on music projects are engaged in sound patterns, melody, and song meanings and messages.
LITERACY:
Literacy is embedded in all of our Inquiry projects and Learning Agreement provocations. Children are writing labels, signs, job descriptions, procedural text, recounts, interview questions, descriptions of their merchandise, etc. Children also engage in Writing workshops and Targets to develop personal goals in their writing skills and genre.
Children engage in guided reading each week and shared and modelled reading experiences for word study and author's craft. Children are encouraged to read every night and make an entry into their Reader's and Writer's notebook regularly.
NUMERACY:
Children are targeted in number concepts at their point of need. Maths Targets are very interactive and focussed on the use of materials to deepen understanding of number concepts. Please don't be alarmed if your child's maths book is looking a little bare - they are very engaged in exploring number concepts visually, orally and kinaesthetically. The formal recording of algorithms and other number processes should will come after the development of strong mental concepts and fluid mental calculation. The children's writing of numerals is targeted within writing workshops and will be a focus in week 9 and 10.
The concepts being developed in the various target groups include:
- Trusting the Count and flexible concepts of the numbers 0-20 (ordering, counting backwards orally, one more than and less than, different ways of constructing each number, teen numbers as one tens frame plus some more, estimation of the size of a collection)
- Using ten as a countable unit (grouping items by 10s to facilitate efficient counting, thinking in tens to prepare for place value understanding, skip counting, explaining their thinking and counting strategies)
- Place Value concept development (exploring the 0-9 number system, understanding that the value of each digit in a number depends on its position in the ones, tens and hundreds columns, understanding the relative value of two and three digit numbers, counting in place value parts).
Our Mini Projects (clubs) of Science, Animation and Gardening will continue until the end of term and we will offer the children a chance to try a new project next term. The children have been very engaged in these sessions and have made strong links to our overarching Inquiry of Change.
Thank you for staying in touch with the Year One Happenings.
See you next week!
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