Year 1 w/b 15th November
Date: 18th Nov 2021 @ 5:02pm
As you may have heard from your child, our nativity rehearsals are in full swing! This year we will be performing ‘Prickly Hay’ as our Key Stage One performance. Letters have been sent out to explain ticketing and today you will have received a letter about your child’s part and costume. The music and lyrics have been added to Showbie for children to also work on at home. We are sure you are going to enjoy these fun songs and thank you in advance for your support in learning them in advance of our performance.
This week has also been Anti-Bullying week in school. Our focus this year is ‘One Kind Word’. Our school safeguarding council put together a very informative assembly to share this important message. Thinking about the impact of our words and how we can spread kindness and also who in school we can look to for support if we need it. We were able to think back to our work in HeartSmart to support this message. We also went on to create our own anti-bullying superheroes and thought about the qualities these superheroes would need to possess, kindness, joy, thoughtfulness, love, and friendship were popular choices.
Year One have been desperate to find out more about what happens to Beegu in our class text, in fact some have been so excited they have looked ahead in the book to find out more! This week we have been asking questions to find out more about Beegu. To do this we have used ‘hot seating’ and other drama techniques before writing questions into our books. We have also written group poems about Beegu at a key point in the text, thinking about her feelings and what the illustration shows us to support our understanding.
In Power maths our focus has been subtraction. Generating subtraction number sentences where we have been given the ‘whole’ and one ‘part’ on a part, whole model. This has supported our understanding that the ‘whole’ number is the number we need to take away from and therefore our number sentences should start with this, the largest number. We then used appropriate strategies to find the answers, using concrete (counters and blocks), pictorial (number lines and drawing the problem out) and abstract methods to find the answers.
Guided reading continues through our normal format, we have been very impressed with children’s comprehension answers this week. Questions can be found in the back of most home reading books that come home with your child. These are great to talk through after your child has become familiar with the text they are reading.
In phonics we have looked at our first of five split digraph phonics sounds a-e (make a cake) and ai (snail in the rain). As always, thank you for your continued support encouraging your children to practise spellings and sentences at home containing these taught sounds.
This week in Collective Worship it has been interfaith week. We learnt how the Hebrew/ Israelite people were led out of Egypt by Moses. Moses, protected by God had gone to the Pharoah to ask that God’s people be set free after 400 years in slavery. The Pharaoh refused and the plagues were sent, one after the other. Finally, when Pharaoh still refused to release the Jewish people, the final plague was sent killing the first born in each household. The angel of death passed over the Israelites and Moses led God’s people out of Egypt to the promised land. Each year Jewish people reflect on Passover with the symbolic seder plate containing charoset (reminding them of the mortar used to build the pyramids, bitter herbs (reminding them about the bitterness of slavery) and salty water (to recall the tears of happiness as being free but sadness that so many people Jewish and Egyptian died). In our reflection time we thought of the things that we felt bitter about and wanted to change and linked this to the recent Cop 26 conference. In Sandi’s worship we then focused on the Israelites in the wilderness.
This week we also welcomed back ‘Open the Book’ a group of Christians who come into School, dress up and act out stories from the Bible for us to enjoy. Year 1 and 2 were mesmerised by their performance of the birth of Jesus. They will return for 20 minutes each month.
In RE our friend Ann Peach, from St Oswald’s Church and our Ethos Council, came into our class to talk to us about two of her favourite Bibe stories. She told us about Daniel and the den of lions, and we realised Daniel, like David, showed our school values of courage and belief. God protected Daniel and rewarded him for his faith. Next, Ann explained the parable of the ‘Good Samaritan’ where anyone in need is your neighbour. She helped us understand the parable by asking us to imagine she had been robbed and hurt and left in the road at Brereton. Church leaders and people might have walked right past fearing they may also be hurt but someone she did not know, someone from a different place, speaking a different language did stop and help.
Forest School on Tuesday involved us following a map and moving between different physical and human features in our school grounds. In Design and Technology, we drew our design for Beegu’s friend, deciding whether we would make a hand mitt or comforter. We labelled our designs showing clearly how we would be joining our fabric pieces together- using a combination of staples, gluing and safety pins. In science we looked in mirrors to draw self-portraits of our face, labelling facial features and connecting the parts of the face to our different senses.
This week in PE we have had MultiFlex come and teach us athletics. We had 5 different stations where we practised our throwing, jumping and running. We were so impressed with the skills and engagement that the children had throughout the lesson and we even had to make some of the stations a bit more challenging! The action shots below capture some of the fun.
In Geography this week, we have been learning about direction and have been using ‘forward’, ‘backwards’, ‘left’ and ‘right’ to give our partners directions around our playground. We have been learning about how we can tell the difference between our left and our right using our hands to help us work out the direction to go remembering that our left hand makes an ‘L’ using our finger and thumb. By the end of the lesson, we were all experts using our positional language cards.
We hope you all have a lovely weekend and enjoy singing our nativity songs at home,
Mrs Pullé, Mrs Lindersen and Mr Whitworth
