There have been many exciting learning opportunities in Year 1 at St Peters Campus recently. Here are some highlights.

Science Week

Students in Year 1 were challenged and excited to learn about sustainability during Science Week. Students learnt about the waste created by fast fashion. To help combat this waste we learnt how to plait and made friendship bracelets for each other out of scraps of fabric. Student wore them with pride and thought of many of ways fabric scraps could be utilised.

We learnt about worm farms through reading and visiting our own school worm farm.

We made gifts for our families out of paper clay. This was an exercise in fine motor skills as well as reading a procedure text.

We revisited our knowledge on the bin system so we could be good models of recycling.

Finally, we were amazed and disappointed when we made a timeline that represented the decomposition rates of familiar items. Plastic bottles, lolly wrappers, even sticky tape made us cringe and rethink how we want to use things in the future.

Book Week

We were so grateful for the amazing Book Week events that took place between all the Concordia campuses. Mrs Molloy delighted students with engaging activities based on the Book Week shortlists. Students twizzled and twirled with “Gymnasticia Fantastica”, made a horsey craft to celebrate ‘If I Were a Horse” and enjoyed a sing along with “Five Little Ducks.”

Students thoroughly enjoyed meeting author and illustrator Sally Heinrich. They bubbled with questions and burst with pride at helping her create some characters.

All in all, Book Week is an invitation to engage with literacy and have lots of fun doing it, and I believe the Year 1 students at St Peters Campus achieved both.

The Science of Weather and Sustainability

Students have been exploring weather and asking questions about sustainability. We wondered if the wind was powerful enough to create energy, so on a really windy day we went outside and felt how the wind can lift up fabric and light objects and toss them about.

We wondered about clouds and the water cycle and asked if clouds stop evaporation. We conducted a fun experiment with shaving cream and coloured water to find an answer.

Some students had been on holidays and when they came back they told us it was so hot where they visited that they got to swim. We asked, 'how could that be? Isn’t it winter all over Australia?' We learnt about different climatic zones and looked at the imaginary line of the equator.

We are really good wonderers...

Learning Measurement Through Play

Students looked at the time it took for a year and unpacked months, days, hours and minutes. They also simulated how many years they had been on the earth by walking around a sun. Each birthday was one passage around the sun. We discussed all of these everyday events in terms of measurement and how we used different units to measure and account for different things.

Students represented weeks and months of the years through larger and smaller items. They created a column graph that represented the heights of their friends using pipes and cylinders.

Great learning, engaged students!

Olivia Livingston
Year 1 Teacher