Year 1 w/b 11th October
Date: 14th Oct 2021 @ 5:00pm
Our penultimate week of this half term has been an exciting one with our church visit yesterday and an additional PE session with the sports coaches from MultiFlex on Wednesday. We have also spent time assessing children’s reading to ensure they are reading at an appropriate level, both in guided reading sessions and through the books that come home with them. The books that children bring home are set to be appropriate for them to read with fluency to develop confidence and understanding of the text.
When marking children’s extended pieces of writing this week we were delighted to see the amazing progress in books since the start of Year One. This week we have been ‘imitating’ and writing our instructional text for ‘How to Trap a Toy Soldier’. The children used their knowledge of the text, the text map and actions to support their writing. This stage of the writing process builds confidence when writing and applying Year One writing features using a familiar text. After completing our imitation writes we moved on to our second stage of ‘imitation’ where we have taken what we now know about instruction writing and edited our key text using our own ideas. We have instructions for how to trap a toy bus, a teddy bear and a naughty Barbie doll!
In maths we have continued to build on our understanding of using part, whole models to generate and write number sentences. For example, if the whole is 8 and the two parts are 6 and 2 we can generate the following four number sentences:
6 + 2 = 8
2 + 6 = 8
8 = 6 + 2
8 = 2 + 6
Applying our understanding of part, whole models and pictorial representations has helped us to generate number sentences and also recall number bonds with increasing fluency.
This week in Maths we have also introduced a new short, daily session focusing on ‘Mastering Number’. Throughout the week we have begun to introduce children to a new piece of maths equipment called the rekenrek. The rekenrek is a tool that was created in the Netherlands and is sometimes called an arithmetic rack or calculating frame we use it to develop number sense. We have also introduced the term ‘subitise’ which means looking and saying the number without needing to count it. We can use subitising instead of counting where there is are small number of objects. A good example of this is just knowing the dots on a dice without needing to count each dot.
Phonics this week has been ar (start the car) and oy (toy for a boy). We added the suffix ed/ing to many of our oy words to compare their meaning e.g. enjoy, enjoyed and enjoying.
We were lucky enough to take part in an additional PE session with MultiFlex this week. The children very much enjoyed learning some new rugby skills. We looked at how to travel with the rugby ball, how to pass the ruby ball (grab it like a hungry hippo and hug it) and how to dodge people trying to get the ball. You can see from the action shots that we had a lot of fun! After half term we will start our weekly sessions with MultiFlex and are already very excited.
This week in Collective Worship we have enjoyed learning more about Isaac’s sons Esau and Jacob. Jacob, in escaping from his brother wrestled with his feelings if guilt and sadness. God was looking out for him though and helped him realise he had made bad choices. Jacob was sorry for his thoughts and actions and asked for forgiveness from God and his brother Esau. He was forgiven and Jacob was reunited with his family once more. This Old Testament story helped us think about the things we wrestle with or find difficult, and the children showed great honesty and thoughtfulness in their contributions which included finding it hard to say sorry when you have done something wrong.
It was lovely to walk down to Church with Year 2 yesterday for a short service. Revd Sandi taught us about baptism and the promises God parents and parents make for their child. She showed us how a baby was blessed with water and the sign of the cross on their forehead but of course you can be baptised at any age and in some churches, there is a belief in full immersion like when Jesus was baptised by his cousin John the Baptist. We finished our service with the Creed and prayers.
In RE, we are reaching the end of our unit on Good News and for our assessment task we focused on the parable of the lost sheep. We re-enacted this story before discussing how the shepherd was like God and the sheep like us. Sometimes we walk away from God, make bad choices, or get lost but Christians believe that he will always search for us, find us, and bring us home.
In Science, we assessed our understanding of what we have learned this half term by classifying leaves into categories of our own choice, for example, have fruit or no fruit, evergreen or not evergreen, shiny leaves and not shiny leaves. We have been pleased by the children’s recall of tree names and the different characteristics trees have. This learning has been reinforced during our walks to Church and at playtimes and in forest school where we have spotted and talked about trees in our locality.
Forest school this week was as interesting as ever and we helped Mr Simmons make a wormery using layers of sand, soil and even banana skins. Next week we will look closely at our wormery and will link it to our learning in HeartSmart.
During our Art and Design lesson we looked again at the work of William Morris and spotted designs inspired by his love of nature in ‘Major Glad and Major Dizzy’. Next we rolled ink over our polystyrene tiles with their etched patterns on to print our own wallpaper design. We think we have some budding designers in the making!
We are very much looking forward to sharing all the fantastic progress and success we have seen this half term with you through our parents consultations next week.
Have a lovely weekend,
Mrs Pulle and Mrs Lindersen
