Year 1 w/b 27th November 2023

Date: 1st Dec 2023 @ 4:12pm

Christmas has well and truly arrived in Year One and happy Advent to you all! It was lovely to see so many of you at our Christmas Fair last Friday. Elfridges was certainly very busy, and the children have chosen some lovely gifts to wrap for special people in their lives. Our Nativity moves on apace and we shall be delighted to share this with you next week. Can we please have all costumes into school by Monday 4th December at the very latest as this shall be our dress rehearsal day. Our Nativity ‘Prickly Hay’ will be performed at 2pm and 6pm on Wednesday 6th December.  

This week in English we have mastered the vocabulary and actions for our information text on Beegu and have planned our reports for our friend of Beegu. We have focused on what they look like, where they come from, what they eat and an amazing fact about them that makes them rather special. Next week, as part of an assessment of writing progress the children will write their own information text using their plan for reference. We shall be checking who can: 

• Say their sentence and record it a word at a time. 
• Use a capital letter for names and new sentences. 
• Use punctuation 
• Spell some Year 1 high frequency words correctly eg the, my, me, like, they 
• Use their phonics to write the sounds they can hear in a word. 
• Form their letters correctly in their handwriting. 

In Phonics we have enjoyed focusing on either split digraphs – i-e (nice smile) and o-e (phone home) or oa (goat in a boat) and ai (snail in the rain). Over the next 2 weeks we shall be completing our Autumn 2 phonics assessment so shall let you know if your child may be moving book colour or if they need a little longer to reinforce certain taught sounds. We have been delighted with the children’s progress both in their reading and writing this term. Thank you for continuing to read at home and for your comments in the reading dairies when reading has been completed and enjoyed. 

Our focus in maths has continued to be 3D and 2D shape. Children can name the different shapes and identify the features that determine how they are classified. By exploring the similarities and differences, children will make the distinction between 2D and 3D shapes. Throughout the unit, shapes are presented in different orientations. This helps children focus on the specific mathematical properties of the shapes and secures their understanding of classifying 2D and 3D shapes. They will also learn to identify individual shapes within composite shapes (where several shapes are joined together) and explore the relationship between 2D and 3D shapes. 

We shall also be assessing children’s maths understanding next week. The first paper will assess mental arithmetic skills and the second is a reasoning paper. The papers will assess all the children’s learning in Year One so far this year.  

On Tuesday, we continued the My Happy Mind unit ‘Celebrate.’ In lesson three, we recapped the 5-character strengths; love and kindness, bravery, and honesty, exploring and learning, teamwork and friendship and love of life and our world. We compared our own character strengths and identified those we saw in others and agreed it was encouraging to tell someone when we saw they showed a particular character strength. We shall practise this strength spotting in the weeks leading to Christmas. Finally, we sang the ‘We are Wonderful and Special’ song adding our own actions. 

Year 1 helped our Open the Book team this week as they re-enacted the story of King Joshua as he listened and trusted God so the walls of Jericho fell. 

In Collective worship we reflected on how we can be peacemakers at school, home and in our community. We wove 3 strands of wool together to represent school, home and communities working together for peace. We also created prayers for peace, which we joined together to make a paperchain showing that if we work together, we have more impact. 

RE focused on how we know Jeus was a Jewish boy. We learned how he went to school at a Synagogue and observed Shabbat and Passover. In science we looked at our five senses and went on a senses walk outside. The ice added a chilly extra element to the sense of touch. In Spanish we completed our unit of work and are now able to greet our Spanish friends, tell them our names, ask them how they are, respond with how we are feeling and say goodbye, see you soon. We completed individual self-assessments to share how we feel our Spanish has progressed this half term. 

Thank you for your continued support and enjoy your family preparations for Advent.  

Mrs Pulle and Mrs Lindersen