Year 1 Update – Wk 10
Professor Peter Sullivan
Peter Sullivan is Professor of Science, Mathematics and Technology Education, at Monash University in Australia. He is the immediate past President of the Australian Association of Mathematics Teachers and was the lead writer of the Australian Mathematics curriculum.
Professor Sullivan is one of the world’s leading authorities in Mathematics, and will be making his a visit to Beacon Hill School this November. During his visit, Professor Sullivan will work alongside the teachers to challenge all our students to reach their full potential in Mathematics through the use of open-ended, rich learning tasks and problems.
We are thrilled to announce that Professor Sullivan will run a workshop for parents in order to enhance your understanding of how you may help your children in the development of Mathematical thinking. This is for parents only, there is no need for children to attend.
An e-notice has been sent out to all parents, please respond if you are planning on attending.
We look forward to seeing you at the workshop.
Central Idea: Numbers can be added and subtracted
Next week we will continue with the concept of subtraction. The vocabulary that we will be using includes take away, difference between, subtraction and minus. By exposing children to a variety of vocabulary supports their understanding of subtraction. Next week the children will also be solving simple subtraction words problems, they will be focusing on the main idea as well as strategies that they can use to solve problems. Children will be encouraged to use their fingers, number lines and materials to help them to solve problems. Please continue to support this work at home by encouraging your child to practice counting backwards from 100 as well as forwards. Instead of alway playing snakes and ladders forwards try playing it backwards.
Through our unit we are also looking at how days of the week and the concept of time and how it helps us organise our lives and cooperate with others. This is something you can support at home by talking through what is happening on different days and encouraging children to take notice of the times daily routines and activities happen. Everyday at school we do our daily calendar looking at the date, day, month and year. This is an easy thing to incorporate into everyday life at home too.
Mathletics: Please spend some time each week exploring the different activities that we have set for the children. Under the ‘play’ section, children can practise their basic facts by playing games with partners from around the world. It is not intended that the children will do these tasks totally independently so please help your child to become familiar with the layout of Mathletics and how to go about completing the tasks. Have fun!
Next week in writing the children will be writing thank you cards to the people who they interviewed. In groups the children will talk about what they found out and reflect upon if there questions were answered. The children will participate in some shared and group writing about some of the systems that we have in school. This may led to some further questioning about how our school community works. Children will have an opportunity to share some of their writing with their friends as part of writers workshop.
Our reading focus for next week continues to be retelling. When children retell or tell a story in their own words we encourage them to talk about how the story started, what happened in the middle, how the story finished, what the problem and the solution are and what the main idea and key details are. Please encourage this at home by having discussions about what you are reading with your children.
Due to the whole school photo there as no Golden Book certificate this week. Our next Golden Book assembly will be on Monday 30th October.
Mathstart – maths picture books
If you are looking for some picture story books to buy or borrow from a library that help teach maths concepts we recommend the mathstart series. Mathstart books are fun, engaging and are about real life problems and experiences that children may face. These books are are even published in Chinese and Korean!
Please visit the following website to view the Mathstart books: http://www.mathstart.net/level-2-books.html
