Week 6

The first six weeks are the most important in setting the tone for the school year.  Already this year the children have established routines that will provide a secure rhythm and framework to their school day and allow them to focus of the learning at hand. Friendships are consolidating and stamina for tasks is growing rapidly. It's a pretty exciting time to be in M1!

In Maths, we are continuing to work in our small groups on our addition and subtraction strategies. These strategies follow a typical continuum of development and your child will be working on developing the next strategy in sequence from the strategy they are currently employing to solve addition and subtraction problems. At Year One the main strategies we are developing are:

• Solve addition and subtraction problems by counting all the objects 
• Solve addition and subtraction problems by counting all the objects in our head
• Solve addition and subtraction problems by counting on or back  from the largest number in my head 
• Solve addition and subtraction problems by counting on or back in tens and ones 
• Solve simple problems mentally by using basic facts we know- doubles, fives, making ten, tidy numbers, place value. 

We will also be discussing the passing of time and making a timeline of events throughout the day. We will be discussing the sequence of the days of the week and events that happen on the different days. 

In Writing, we will continue reinforcing the writing cycle we learned about last week because good writers are never 'done'. We will be looking at authors who use patterns in their books, including in our early readers we bring home and try emulating this in our writing by creating pattern books of our own. 

Our focus in Reading is- Readers can 'read' an unfamiliar book by looking carefully at the pictures and imagining how the story goes. In guided reading groups we will be using the comprehension strategy of  predicting. 

Our Inquiry into Community is continuing. We have been gathering data by interviewing people at school about community. We still need more data though! This week I will send home some simple interview sheets similar to the ones we have been using at school. Please could you take a moment to let your child interview you about community to add to our data. The children should draw a simple picture to remind them of what you have said, but if you could please jot down your answer in the box also that would be helpful. I will include a couple of extra sets with each child in case they are feeling brave enough to interview someone in the community (dairy owner, sports coach etc) to get their perspective on what they love about our local community. 

Upcoming Events:

Swimming Tuesday & Thursday

Library Wednesday 

Gala Mufti Day Friday- Baked goods 

Gala Saturday 11 March 10-2pm 

Please keep sending in any spare plastic bags you have at home for use at the gala. 

Please also check that all items of clothing are named (including swimming gear) as we have had a lot of lost items lately.