Dear Year 1 Families,

As a team we would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge and reflect on our remote learning journey and highlight the direction where we are working towards. We are extremely appreciative of the time, energy and effort you are putting in to helping us work together to make the best of this opportunity.

We have now been participating in remote learning for 4 weeks. From our personalised phone calls we have identified the various demands that our families are experiencing and the range of variables and expectations under which all families are helping and guiding students to complete tasks. Many of these are based around each family’s individual routines which ultimately aims to create a work-life balance in the home during these unique and challenging times.

At present, our records indicate that all families are connected to digital supports and resources such as Wushka, Seesaw, the Year 1 Learning Blogs and now most recently marking your child’s attendance online.

We have listened to your feedback which has proven to be invaluable. Each week we have made slight changes to the Year 1 Learning Blog to support the learning needs of our students based on some of the feedback provided from parents. As a team our digital awareness has grown in leaps and bounds and we are extremely proud of our personalised class blogs, our videos and audio instructions, all which aim to help keep our community feeling connected during this challenging time.

Over the next few weeks we as a team aim to introduce Google Meets This is an online learning space where students can participate in online conferences. We are excited to introduce this opportunity as we are able to have face to face conversations with our students and it is a great chance for them to interact with their peers. Each week we will send out a timetable with the date, time and the code to enter the chat. If your child cannot attend the allocated time and date set for them in the Google Meet, please rest assured that students’, dates and times will rotate during the remainder of the home learning period. Please do not stress if your child misses one of these as there will be many opportunities.

There will also be changes to our Literacy program. Most families have collected their home learning packs which contained a new writing book and a special handwriting book. Please do not complete any pages in the handwriting book unless instructed by your classroom teacher. We will work through this together and focus on correct letter formation, size and slope. Students are asked to only use a greylead pencil when completing pages from this book. From your feedback, a common concern was correct pencil grip and writing stamina. Therefore on our blogs there will be a tab titled Resources. On this page we will post updates with some simple hand exercises aimed at supporting and developing correct pencil grip and writing stamina. As the term progresses other tools to support your child’s learning will be added. From week 5 we are excited to introduce Guided Reading videos with explicit instructions, a focus and tasks for students to complete at their individual reading and comprehension levels.

We would like to acknowledge all of your amazing work posted on Seesaw. From week 5 onwards, there will be a small change regarding which pieces will need to be posted to your child’s teacher each week. The designated tasks will be clearly stated in the planners and these will assist us to maintain a formal record of each child’s work so that we can track their individual progress and provide feedback to assist students in completing future tasks.

We thank you for your ongoing support and feedback. As a team we miss each student and their unique personalities and talents.

We hope to be reconnected again soon. In the meantime continue posting your amazing work to us via Seesaw.

Many thanks

Year 1 Team

Mrs Connie Olszewski, Ms Nicky Mifsud, Ms Annabelle Toro and Mr Matthew Said.