Year 1 Update – Wk 10

We have now started our second unit ‘How We Organise Ourselves’. This is a great unit with the Central Idea: ‘People play different roles in the communities they belong to’.

This week and next week, we have mostly been focussing on our school community, and we will widen it when the children have a good understanding of this. The children have been learning that a community is a group of people who help each other. Please ask your child about their understanding of a community.

We have already had some great offers from many parents to come in and talk the children about their kind of work but if you would also like to come in to talk about your job or role in the community, we would be very grateful. Even if you think your job is boring or complicated, we can help translate it to be fun and interesting to young children. It’s great to see the variety of jobs people in Hong Kong do, so please contact your teacher if you would like to come in.

We have now started our new maths unit focussing on the central idea: ‘Addition and subtraction are connected to each other and are used to solve problems’. 

Although many of the children can tell us different equations, not all of them really understand what the equation means or what it looks like. When we teach addition at school, we very much focus on solving problems by drawing a picture, acting it out and using manipulatives such as counters, unifix, raisins, toy cars etc to help the children understand what addition looks like.

For many children board games are a new and different way to play together. Board games such as snakes and ladders are excellent learning opportunities not just for maths, but also for social skills such as taking turns. We are aiming for the children to eventually be able to play these games in pairs without adult supervision. Practising these games at home with adults or children will be of great benefit, to model counting on on a number line/grid and also to practise social interaction.