Year 1 w/b 14th February

Date: 17th Feb 2022 @ 4:16pm

The highlight of our week this week was most certainly our afternoon trip to a local farm in Brereton where we were shown around by Farmer Wendy, Farmer Derik, and Farmer Ruth. They introduced us to the adult cows, teenage cows and a very tiny baby calf. The calf had only been born the day before! We also looked at some of the farm building including the milking parlour and cow shed. It was very interesting to see the different foods eaten by the cows including the bucket of silage. We couldn’t believe that cows eat about ten buckets full each day! Finally, before leaving we all got the chance to sit on the tractor and even got to beep the horn. This was such a fun and interesting afternoon out to support our learning in Geography this half term. We hope you enjoy looking at the pictures below.

In English this week we have finished our unit of work on Hermelin the Detective Mouse and created book reviews of the text. We have also used our writing time to write up recounts of our trip to the farm. This gave us the opportunity to show off our Year One writing skills in a different context. It was great to see children readily using capital letters, full stops, and/because to join sentences and the use of sequencing conjunctions to order the recounts.

In phonics we have focussed on ear (hear with your ear) and ure (sure it’s pure). These sounds will be reflected in the spellings that come home after half term. 

We have also come to the end of our recap on handwriting letter formations for lower case letters of the alphabet. Handwriting is a big focus in Year One, working on handwriting at home as well when children are completing their spelling homework would be a great help. They know the rhymes we use to support our letter formation e.g., for writing ‘a’ we say ‘around the apple and down the leaf).

This week in maths we have been continuing with subtraction where we have been:

• Crossing ten in subtraction – take part of the number to get to the ten before then take the rest (using a part, whole model to support our knowledge of what to take to get to ten then the rest we need to take) e.g. 14 – 8 = we would do 14 – 4 to get to 10 then take the remaining 4 as 10 – 4 which we instantly know the answer will be 6.
• Answering word and picture subtraction problems
• Speedy recall of addition and subtraction facts to 20
• Comparing addition and subtraction number sentences using <, > and =

This week our PE session was a little different from our invasion game focus this half term as the children took part in a one off street dance PE session. They had great fun learning and performing the dances and the teachers from MultiFlex were so impressed with the levels of enthusiasm in the lesson.

We came to the end of our ‘Too Much Selfie Isn’t Healthy’ HeartSmart unit of work this week and therefore we took some time to reflect on how we show love for others. We thought about the following questions from Boris the robot:

• How have you helped someone else this week?
• How did it make the other person feel?
• How did it make you feel?

In Collective worship this week our journey through the Bible has led us to exploring God’s relationship with King Solomon, David’s son. Solomon asked God for the gift of wisdom and we thought to be wise would show you had learned from your mistakes. We thought about what we would ask God for and some of our thoughts were, courage and belief, laughter and joy and the gift of compassion.

Our second unit in Design Technology this term has been mechanisms. Our unit started with an opportunity to explore sliders in order that the children understood:

• Sliders are mechanisms
• Sliders can make things move
• Moving models can be created that use sliders
• They can use the words: up, down, left, right, vertical and horizontal to describe movement.

Secondly, we designed the background, moving part and described the movement in a moving picture based on our focus text Hermelin. Next, we used our design to make our own moving pictures. Some of us made Hermelin move up and down lampposts and across chimney pots on Offley Street. Finally, we evaluated our moving pictures identifying what went well and what we would improve next time and we had a quiz to access our understanding of mechanisms.  

We hope you have a fun and enjoyable half term and look forward to seeing you back after the break.

Mrs Pulle and Mrs Lindersen