Bandicoot Unit Reception – Year 1

The Bandicoot Unit provides a welcoming and rich learning environment for reception and year 1 students. With a small class size, this allows for all students to develop in their learning with small group work and opportunities for 1:1 support. The Bandicoot Unit has a natural and calming ambiance.

The class setting allows all students to feel safe and confident to experiment with their learning and wonderings. Our hands on learning style, along with a mixture of explicit teaching and play-based learning allows for all students to be involved and engaged.

We focus on literacy in the morning, numeracy between recess and lunch and then PBL in the afternoons. We follow Heggerty each morning, which is a phonemic awareness program and use Sound Waves for our spelling program, exploring the sounds, graphemes, heart words and word building. We are beginning to incorporate the Big Ideas in Number framework in numeracy, supporting conceptual development of number sense, focusing on trusting the count in the early years.

This term in PBL we are focusing on recycling and have started our own worm farm. The Bandicoots have learnt about the process of how a worm farm works and how the worms break down and decompose the food scraps. We will then put the worm castings on our vegetable garden. We are hoping to then use our produce from the vegetable garden to create something delicious to eat!