1 Nov 2019

Yr1 Curriculum Update -01/11/19

Working together to achieve success for every child

Welcome to Year One

This is the second unit for Year 1 and will run into the new year. They will be making connections between our first unit of ‘Who We Are’ by identifying how we have used classroom systems help us. The students will investigate this unit through the lenses of interconnection, the structure and function of systems and how we participate in social decision making.

During this inquiry they will explore the concept of what a system is by investigating systems we use, and how and why we use them. They will look at the connections between systems and people by exploring the people and parts involved in designed systems. They will use this knowledge to make systems to solve problems and adapt and change systems to improve them. They will begin to explore the interconnected relationships between systems, their parts and the role of people in designing and using them.

They will unpack the skill of analysis to help them identify elements of systems that work or don’t work, allowing them to redesign systems. They will collaborate to generate new ideas of how to make systems and make group decisions to plan and make their designed systems. The skills they will develop and practise to help them do this are observation, questioning and planning.

‘Transdisciplinary learning-it’s all connected

We have had an amazing start to our new unit with a visit to the ‘Space Dome’. We explored the solar system and began to make connections with the system of time being connected to the sun, earth and moon. Children have been looking at pictures of familiar systems and discussing complex ideas such as, ‘What makes it a system?’, ‘What do systems need to have?’ and ‘What are systems for?’.Over the course of this unit children will be exploring these complex ideas in systems of their choosing.

At KJS we are exploring ways to help children be agentic learners and support agency In Year 1 one of our main building blocks for agentic learning is through their play. A big thank you for those of you that were able to attend the workshop and play session with your child. We hope you saw the power of voice and choice for your child to pursue their learning through different media and contexts. The central idea and lines of inquiry in this unit have been carefully planned so that children can explore the same concepts and skills but apply their learning in different ways. This will include researching systems of their choice, making systems of their choice and choosing the resources they want to make it with. Research shows that when children explore themes they are interested in their motivation and perseverance levels are greatly increased.

This unit will be about valuing problems and making mistakes so help improve systems. This theme of mistakes being powerful will be explored in aspects of their learning and embraced and celebrated in the class. It is important that children have choice in the nature of their learning as they are often more willing to accept mistakes and think and work in new ways if they are highly motivated with the topic. Please see below for some great books that you can read or watch with your child to help reinforce these ideas.

In literacy we have been using our reading and writing targets to give us a focus during our literacy activities. Each class has chosen skills that we have developed over the first half of the term and children have then self selected which targets they want to work on. They will be using some of these targets to help guide conversations during the 3 way meetings. These targets are flexible and children move between them when they feel accomplished or seek a different challenge.

Inquiring into letter shape and formation with open ended resources.

In mathematics we are becoming more secure with the concepts of place value. That is we know what the value of a number is, we can use different tools to show the value, we can put these values in order of amount and we can record these values in different ways. We are making connections that there are systems for counting, such as counting up or down number lines to find numbers less than or more than a given number. We will begin to look at other systems of counting that link to our work on subitizing, such as counting in groups of 5’s in tallies or 10’s on our hands.