Category: Year 1 Blue

Year One Purposeful Practice Weeks 4 and 5

February 21, 2015
Tanya De Gooijer
· Year 1 Blue · Year 1 Gold

Dear Parents

Our Purposeful Practice homework grid for weeks 4 and 5 is ready to go!
Please click on the link below to see the allocated tasks for next two weeks. A hard copy will be sent home also.
Homework grids are due back to the class teacher on Friday 6 March.

Year 1 Purposeful Practice Parent Letter

Year 1 Purposeful Practice Week 4-5

This week sees the children bring home a reading book and sight words to practice each night as a part of their purposeful practice. The children are a little excited and can’t wait to get their hands on their first book!

Further instructions on how to fill in your children’s reading log can be found on the following link.

Yr 1 Reading Books and Sight Words Parent Letter

Have fun reading together!

Celebrating our Differences

February 11, 2015
Tanya De Gooijer
· Year 1 Blue

We have had a wonderful start to Year One – learning new things and getting to know each other!

It’s really great to be back at school and we welcome Ethan, Linisha and Joshua to our class!

We have started the term by reinforcing how special and unique we are in so many ways!

One of the learning experiences we have been involved in was reading the story ‘It’s Okay to be Different’ and creating a bright paper artwork of our face, similar to the illustrations in the story.

We created ourselves!

We impressed each other with our amazing cutting skills!

We impressed each other with our great cutting skills!

We had fun using our imaginations and our favourite colours!

We also improvised on the text and came up with our own ideas…

It’s okay to be a Construction Worker!
Jason

It’s okay to have new teeth growing!
Ruby

It’s okay to have different friends!
Roman

It’s okay to make mistakes!
Linisha

It’s okay to get married!
Thea

Our Guided Inquiry investigation sees us explore the concept of ‘Identity’ and what it means to be the best person we can be.

We created our own identity collages using a range of beautiful materials. We loved being so creative!

Ethan’s fabulous collage creation!

Reece used many different materials to create herself!

Love your hair Thea!

We had a discussion and shared some ideas to the question –

How can we best the best person we can be?

Get plenty of sleep.
Reece

Keep our muscles working in our hands.
Thomas

Be a kind person.
Amber

Help others when they’re hurt.
Eimear

Eat!
Sajith

Just be you!
Holly

Bye for now!

Year One – Photos Needed!

February 8, 2015
Tanya De Gooijer
· Year 1 Blue · Year 1 Gold

Our Guided Inquiry topic this term sees us investigate the concept of ‘Identity’ through our unit titled ‘Growing Older and Wiser’. Through planned learning experiences the children will investigate how we grow, change and learn over time and how we can help ourselves be the best we can be!

To help facilitate some of our understandings we are asking parents to provide photos of different stages of their child’s life to create an Individual Identity Timeline.

Please click on the below link for further information.

We would love to have all photos in by the end of Week 3 – Friday 13th February!

Thank you!

Year One Identity Timeline

Learning is Fun in Year 1B!

November 27, 2014
Tanya De Gooijer
· Year 1 Blue

Even though we are coming to the end of a busy term we are still trying to pack in as much learning as we can! We are having a great time learning our dance moves for our Edudance and Christmas Concert and can’t wait to show off how coordinated we are becoming!

In Mathematics we have finished off our investigations into measurement by celebrating with a fun activity. We measured a few of our favourite characters using fluffy marshmallows!

We had a fantastic time measuring with marshmallows! They are a perfect size for measuring…and they smelt delicious!

We made sure to lay the marshmallows carefully in a straight line. This made it easier for us to count them!

We have discovered that marshmallows are not only fantastic in hot chocolate but are also brilliant for measuring too because they are a perfect uniform size! We were a little overcome by the sweet smell of the marshmallows but we concentrated hard for accurate measurements!

The mathematics fun has continued with this week’s investigations into 3D shapes. We have found quite a few 3D shapes within our classroom and had even more fun creating our own using pipe cleaners! We have learnt these new words when describing 3D shapes – cube, cone, rectangular prism, cylinder and a pyramid. Have a look around your house too! We bet you can spot heaps of 3D shapes!

We made these great 3D shapes – a pyramid and a cylinder. It was a little tricky for us to envision what we were creating…but we did it!

The fun continues in out literacy centres! We have been practising our individual spelling sounds using hands on materials. We used Lego bricks and pressed them into play dough to make words to match our sound! We also used small coloured beads and used these to spell words too! This activity was great for our little muscles in our hands!

We used Lego to help us with our spelling sounds! Can you see the words toy and hint?

These ‘all’ words were created with small beads!

Each week we have an activity to help us with our sight words. We especially enjoy playing Sight Words Twister! Sometimes we end up in a bit of a tangle!

We love playing Sight Words Twister! Our new favourite catch cry is “let’s get twisted!”

In Religious Education we have celebrated our final activity for the unit of work titled Just Imagine. We have looked at a few different illustrations of Jesus and have discovered that these illustrators have had to use their imaginations to create their illustrations. We used fine black pens to create our own portraits of Jesus using our imagination and sharing our ideas during a writing task. We are looking forward to learning about Advent and the ways in which we prepare for the birth of Jesus.

We used our imaginations to create a portrait of what we thought Jesus might have looked like.

Some of our finished Jesus portraits.

Just Imagine!

November 12, 2014
Tanya De Gooijer
· Year 1 Blue

We are always so busy learning new and exciting things in Year One! This week we have dived head first into our Religious Education unit of work titled Just Imagine.

We explored some of the ways we like to use our imaginations and came up with a few funny ideas for the sentence starter
‘Imagine if…’

Imagine if the world was made of chocolate and everything grew back as chocolate and we could keep eating it.
Billy

Imagine if the rain was green.
William

Imagine if every animal was a different colour.
Ava

Imagine if instead of drink fountains we had chocolate fountains.
Maureen

Imagine if everyone was nice and kind and loved each other.
Brodie

We used our imaginations to wonder about God and His imagination. He created so many wonderful things in our world. We wondered which animal, plant or insect He enjoyed using His imagination to create. Cute puppies and fierce lions featured high on our list!

Imagine if God created tigers to be cute and cuddly!

God used His imagination to create beautiful birds!

We know that Jesus was just like us in many ways and that He had an imagination too. Jesus used His imagination to tell stories about God. We listened to the story Jesus and the Lost Sheep and learnt that Jesus used this story to tell people that God loves them like a shepherd loves his sheep.
God loves every single person in a special way.

We used our imaginations to create illustrations to match the story!

Using our imaginations to create the lost sheep!

Jesus used His imagination to tell stories about God’s love.

God loves every person in a special way.

If everyone lived like Jesus and used their imagination to work out ways of showing love, there would be more happiness everywhere.
How have you used your imagination to show love?

Out and About!

October 30, 2014
Tanya De Gooijer
· Year 1 Blue

We have had a busy start to the term! Last week we were lucky enough to visit Woolworths and the Gosnells Railroad Markets as part of Inquiry Unit titled “Necessity – Raw to Ready”. We enjoyed visiting each destination but we secretly loved the bus ride!

At Woolworths we were each given an item to locate in the store. We had to pick the one that appealed to us the most and then we found the cheapest one to compare. We discovered that the colourful packaging along with interesting pictures attracted our attention the most…this certainly effects what mum and dad put in the trolley each week!

When we arrived at the Gosnells Railroad Markets we found so many examples of needs, wants and items that were raw and ready for us to buy! We discovered that most of the raw items were found in the same area such as fruit, vegetables, a butcher and a fish shop…that was a little smelly! Some of us even found the massage chair…what a luxury to have one of these…definitely a want!

We spotted the raw seafood! It did smell a little fishy!

So many fresh and healthy choices at the markets!

We found an interesting poster showing some of the fish found in Australian waters.

This week we have begun our investigations into measuring! We have been measuring different items in our classroom using different materials. We even measured the length of each other! We have discussed the different types of measuring from the size of our clothing, to the length of shoes to how heavy we might be.

Measuring with informal units.

During our activities we discovered some important things to remember when measuring length…our measuring items must be touching, they should be the same size and using very smaller items to measure takes up a lot of time!

Measuring the length of our bodies!

We discovered that measuring with small objects takes a long time!

We have been measuring with different items in our class from pompoms and matchsticks to playing cards and buttons. These types of objects are known as informal units.

We are having a lot of fun!

Money, Money, Money!

October 17, 2014
Tanya De Gooijer
· Year 1 Blue

One of our Mathematic topics this term is investigating Australian money. We have been learning about dollars and cents and how we can tell each coin and note apart. We have learnt that our money has lots of famous Australian people and animals on it! Our goal is to be able to place all the coins and notes in order according to their value and to use coins to show the price of items.

This terms inquiry unit is titled ‘Necessity – Raw to Ready’. We have begun our investigations into this topic by discussing needs and wants under the headings of food, shelter and clothing. We have realised that some of the things we enjoy eating, playing with and wearing aren’t really affecting our survival. Unfortunately some of the things we want are things we don’t always need!

To link our learning to real life we have created a class market. We voted on the name of the market and decided on ‘Year One Blue Fresh Food Market’. We worked in pairs to create posters advertising what we have on offer!

We are having a fabulous time shopping and are putting our knowledge of money to good use!

We worked in pairs to create a poster advertising an item from our market. We had to make sure we wrote the $ in the correct position.

Some of our finished posters advertising our market items!

Our market is open for business and awaiting it’s first customers!

Working out the cost of our items and the change we need to give back.

Sharing the Past – Week 8 Term 3

September 11, 2014
Tanya De Gooijer
· Year 1 · Year 1 Blue

This term we have been curious about life in the past. We recently put together a History of Me bag and used the iPads to create a story about our short life using the items we brought in. We had a great time sharing and chatting about objects and photos that are special to us.

We placed our special items in the correct sequence.

We used an app called My Story to create a mini story book about the History of Me!

We had a lovely morning with our Grandparents earlier this week. We listened to some Grandparents share information about their life when they were young and even got to have a look at some old items like telephones, cameras with film, typewriters and old toys. More Grandparents joined us for morning tea and old fashioned games. We all had a wonderful morning and loved spending time with our Groovy Grandparents!

So many Grandparents and special friends came for a special morning together!

So many Grandparents and special friends came for a lovely morning together!

Our telephones look a bit different today!

We enjoyed playing some games from the past!

We all enjoyed playing some games from the past!

We are in the process of creating a mini story about our Grandparents. We are using the information we gathered in our interviews to write about our Grandparents. We enjoyed sharing our information and have learnt some funny stories about our Grandparents!

Books, Books and more Books!

August 31, 2014
Tanya De Gooijer
· Year 1 · Year 1 Blue

We are enjoying our reading!

We had a wonderful time on our excursion to the Fremantle Literacy Centre. In class we have been looking very closely at the illustrations in the stories we read, paying particular attention to the techniques used in creating these illustrations. We had a look at how the illustrations were created in two stories.

We explored the story The Swap written by Jan Ormerod and illustrated by Andrew Joyner. We learnt that the illustrator used a computer to create his images and because this process takes a long time he only used a few colours in his illustrations.

Would you swap your little brother or sister? Caroline Crocodile tried to in this story!

We enjoyed looking at the original illustrations!

We walked around looking carefully at the illustration boards!

We also had a great time reading and admiring the beautiful illustrations in the story Hunting for Dragons written by Bruce Whatley. We looked very closely at the illustrations and discovered a dragon hidden on every page!

Do you believe in dragons?

We hunted for dragons on each page!

We had a lovely time in Fremantle and made sure that no dragons followed us back to school! A big thank you to Mrs Hunt and Mr McKie for joining us on our excursion!

We have also been busy reading stories and sharing information about our amazing dads in preparation for Father’s Day. We have read many stories about dads and have created portraits of our own dad.
We are looking forward to our showing our portraits very soon!

Bari’s Amazing Dad!

Indiana’s Groovy Day!

Future Tennis Players in Year One!

August 16, 2014
Tanya De Gooijer
· Year 1 Blue

Terrific Tennis in Year One Blue!

We have been very lucky to participate in a Hand Eye Clinic each Friday. Coach Phil has been teaching us some movements used when playing tennis to help us with our coordination and eye tracking. Eye tracking is an important skill because it helps us to ‘track’ words across a page when we are reading and writing.

We have learnt three tennis shots – backhand, forehand and volley and have discovered some future tennis players among us!

We have had a terrific time learning new skills, having fun and enjoying the fresh air!

You might even see some of us at a future Australian Open…in a few years of course!