Year 1 w/b 30th October 2023
Date: 3rd Nov 2023 @ 4:51pm
It has been lovely to welcome back our class to school after the half term break and we returned to find a surprise on our school field. A spaceship had crash landed in our forest school next to our new outdoor classroom! Its lights had broken, and it was covered with twigs and mud. But who could fly in a spaceship like this? Where had it come from? Would it still fly? We had lots of questions and some research in our book area revealed a text called ‘Beegu’ which had a spaceship in it that looked remarkably like the one on our field. We have explored our feelings about Beegu from looking at the illustration on the first page and have started to explore what Beegu wants to say to the leaves, trees and rabbits that run away from her or do not stay still to listen.
In phonics, our focus has been air (that’s not fair) and ir (whirl and twirl) or i-e (nice smile) and o-e (phone home) depending on the phonics group your child is in.
Maths Mastery has focused on odd and even numbers – as in Number blocks, odd tops, and flat tops. We have practised identifying pairs of number and how for example 8 is made from 4 pairs. In Power Maths the children have been introduced to formal addition for the first time through the idea of ‘count all’ and ‘count on’ strategies. A ‘count all’ strategy is when all parts are added together to make a whole. A ‘count on’ strategy asks children to start with a number and count on. As well as introducing children to some of the key language associated with addition, children will also begin to develop an understanding of the commutativity of addition – the idea that addition calculations can be performed in any order. We have used a number line this week as a tool for counting on. If children would like to practise using a number line at home, please see the sheet in their book bags. We encourage the children to circle the number they are starting from and draw the jumps they are adding and then circle the total.
Our new RE unit is called My World, Jesus’ world and our key question is ‘How is the place where Jesus lived different from where we live now?’. In this unit, we are exploring what life was like when Jesus, God the Son, was alive on earth. This unit will help children:
- understand that Jesus lived a long time ago and that the world we live in is very different to Jesus’ world over 2000 years ago.
- talk about the human nature and experience of Jesus as he lived in the world at that time.
- start to understand that Jesus was a Jew and would have followed Jewish law and traditions.
This week we sat in a circle in pairs and chose nativity costumes to wear as an example of how people may have dressed over 2,000 years ago, in Jesus’ time. Clearly the clothes in Jesus’ time were very different from ours and we thought about why this was. We also discussed what else may have been different- homes, transport, food, and toys.
Our focus for this half term in Collective worship is Peace. To help us understand how we can be peacemakers we listened to Matthew 5:9 and discussed what peace was and how we could achieve this in school. During our reflection time, we created a class peace promise.
The My Happy Mind unit for this half term is ‘Celebrate.’ In this unit the children will learn what character is and how your character makes you special. There are 5-character strengths that we shall focus upon:
- Love and kindness
- Bravery and honesty
- Exploring and learning
- Teamwork and friendship
- Love of life and our world
We thought about where our strengths lie and loved singing the ‘We are wonderful and Special ‘song. We agreed we all have different strengths, and we can use them each day.
In design and technology, we are preparing to make a friend for Beegu. This will take the form of either a comforter or hand mitt. In our first lesson we explored different ways to join two pieces of fabric together which included gluing, safety pinning and stapling.
This week we were lucky enough to have hot chocolate in the new outdoor classroom in forest school. Mr. Simmons reminded us about the importance of safety whilst sitting around the fire pit in the middle of the new forest building and excited us about the ways it will be used in the future. Father Christmas may even use it if he has time to visit us at our Christmas Fair on 24th November!
Our new PE unit is multiskills and this week we focused on wearing magic shoes to travel around with light feet before we focused on balance as we walked along lines, looking forward, arms in line and knees slightly bent. Next, we practiced balancing with something on our heads- like cones, bean bags and cones. Finally, we played a team game to see who could travel the quickest zig zagging between cones as we balanced equipment on our heads.
In our first Geography topic of the year we will be focusing on local geography in our school grounds. This week we introduced the concept of human and physical features. We then went on a hunt for human and physical features in our school grounds. Examples of human features included the school building, play ground and the climbing frame. Examples of physical features included the trees and grass as well as the plants growing in our garden area.
We have also introduced our new science topic this week. This term we will be looking at humans and will develop our science skills to identify, name, draw and label the basic parts of the human body and say which part of the body is associated with each sense. This week we looked at the knowledge we already know about the human body, we labelled the body parts we can already identify and began to this about what we would like to find out this term in Science.
As you may have seen on our topic web, Year One will be walking down to St. Oswald’s Church at 10:30am on Thursday 9th November for a church service. As with our Harvest Service, you are more than welcome to join us for this. We would ask that you meet us at church and walk back to school with us after the service. We look forward to seeing you there if you are able to make it.
Enjoy the weekend,
Mrs Pulle, Mrs Lindersen and the Year One Team
