Year 1

Children have well and truly settled in to life at school by the beginning of Year 1. The students now know the daily expectations and routines of the classroom, as well as the layout of the school and most of the teachers. They also have a beginning understanding of transitioning between year levels and meeting a new teacher each year. This is the children’s first experience at school of being in a new class with children that may not have been in their classroom last year in Prep, so it is a terrific opportunity for social and emotional learning.

In Year 1 a big focus is on developing independence; for example, children being responsible for changing their own books each week to take home and read, carrying their own bag to and from school, and looking after their belongings.

We continue to develop students’ decoding and comprehension strategies in reading; their use of conventions and organisation in writing, with a number of writing prompts and text types; and students’ speaking and listening skills through a variety of collaborative approaches. We have many foci in Numeracy including children’s counting skills, addition and subtraction strategies and we assist them in developing an understanding of place value. We foster an understanding of measurement, data displays, chance and probability. We immerse our students in Big Question and Discovery Time as a way of exploring children’s understandings of science, geography and history. We love that children start to understand how to form their own questions and research possible answers. Self-managing their time is a huge component of our work. We work on social skills such as: how to be a good friend, how to include others, the difference between ‘dobbing’ and ‘telling’, body language, naming emotions, The Catastrophe Scale, and how to deal with worries.