Year 1 w/b 6th September
Date: 10th Sep 2021 @ 4:54pm
It has been lovely getting to know the children this week and essentially following our Year 1 timetable. This second week back at school has been full of excitement which started with the delivery of a basketful of toys – an old teddy, some coins, marbles, toy soldiers, a wooden ark and plan. This led ask lots of questions about the age of the toys. Had they come from a museum? Who did they belong to? Could we play with them? Next, we discovered a picture of 2 soldiers under wooden floorboards and they were surrounded by some of the toys we saw the day before in the basket. We made a list of all the things we could see in the picture and used adjectives to describe them. After this we imagined the conversation between the soldiers and some of us even dressed as soldiers. Finally, we discovered that the pictures and toys belonged in a book called ‘Major Glad, Major Dizzy.’ We read part of the story before making predictions about how it may end. Please see various photos attached below showing part of our hook lesson on Monday and the soldier’s conversation.
In phonics we have reviewed some of the teaching in reception and focused on ss, ff, qu and x. As in reception this is structured 20 minute lesson where we say the sound, read words with that sound in them, count the phonemes using’ Fred fingers’ and finally write the word before using focus words in dictated sentences. Spelling homework will be sent home on Monday and will give the children a chance to practise what they have been doing in phonics the previous week. Can homework be returned to school by Friday please.
Guided reading has started this week and thank you to all those parents that have commented / signed planners and listened to your child each day this week. Books will be changed on a Monday and Thursday every week, if your child has read their book, and reading diaries should be in school every day. The guided reading book will invariably be different to their individual home reader.
In Maths, we have been extremely busy carrying out some baseline assessments before we start Power Maths books next week. This week our activities have been based around a hundred square, finding missing numbers and writing teen numbers. We extended the activity to finding one more /less and 10 more /less. Following this we have made our own 1-20 number lines and have started to explore sharing a number of objects between 2, 3 and 4 groups.
In Collective worship, we have focused on our School motto ‘To Love God, Love learning and Love one another’ and the values that underpin that belief. These include responsibility, service, aspiration, compassion and friendship. We considered how we show these values in our own lives and how we share them with others. This linked beautifully with our work in RE on ‘Good News’ as we looked at good news stories and pictures from the news where we saw refugees being offered aid, the lonely being comforted and the poorly being cared for. Next, we drew our own good news pictures and wrote captions and news headlines to go alongside our pictures.
In Heart Smart this week we enjoyed getting to know Boris the robot. Boris is a special robot because he has a heart like we do. We thought about what our heart is and that many choices we make can help or hurt our hearts. We can make choices that fill our hearts with things that help us feel good (e.g. being proud of something we have done, encouraging a friend, helping someone who is hurt) or we can make choices that will cause our hearts to feel sad (e.g. being unkind to someone, not helping when asked, thinking we are failures).
Being Heart Smart means looking for ways that help our hearts and the hearts of those around us. We looked at the Power ON button slide and thought about where we have seen it before. The Power ON button helps us to ask these two important questions:
- How can I love myself more? (I = me)
- How can I love others more? (O = others)
You might have noticed the ‘power on’ buttons children came home with on Tuesday. It’s called 'Power ON' because the power button is made up of an I and an O and as we consider ourselves and others more, we’re ‘Powering ON’ to being more Heart Smart. We made our own Power ON stickers by drawing the Power ON button on a sticky label and placing it over our hearts and imagined Powering ON by pressing the button. We can use this to make Heart Smart choices to help our own heart and the hearts of others.
In science, we started our science learning on plants by making a record about we what we already know and choosing our class tree (an apple tree in the garden area) which we shall keep a diary off over the months to record seasonal changes. In Tuesday’s forest school Mr Simmons focused on the seasons to link in with our work in science. We could already see some seasonal changes as autumn approaches. The children also thoroughly enjoyed a scavenger hunt working cooperatively.
Our work in history links closely with our key text ‘Major Glad, Major Dizzy’. This is a story about two toy soldiers hidden beneath the floor of a London house in 1870, during the reign of Queen Victoria. As years go by, the children who once owned the toys grow up and have children of their own, and unknown to Major Glad and Major Dizzy, all kinds of changes happen above their heads until, when they are finally rescued 140 years later, the world they knew is almost unrecognisable. Today we introduced our history of toys topic by talking about our current favourite toys and describing them. Fidget toys and poppits were very popular choices. Children then began to consider toys from the past by thinking about what toys their parents, grandparents and even great grandparents might have played with when they were five or six years old. It was lovely to hear that so many children had gone home and asked their grownups what their favourite toys had been.
This half term our PE focus is dance using animals as a theme. Today we warmed up our bodies by considering how to move like animals to the song ‘Animal Action’ before playing a game of animal statues. We created a mind map of animal themed words to use in our dance before considering different movements to introduce the concept of how actions can be performed to represent ideas – we had some excellent snakes, elephants, tigers and even parrots! Next week we will incorporate these ideas to create a short 16 count phrase to the music ‘I’m the King of the Swingers.’
It was great to see so many children on bikes and scooters on Monday as we prepared for the Tour of Britain ride through Brereton yesterday. A few photos can be seen below.
So, a pretty busy but most enjoyable week. We are very pleased with the way in which the class have settled into Year 1 and we hope you can all enjoy a happy weekend. We look forward to seeing everyone on Monday morning.
Mrs Pulle and Mrs Lindersen
