Year 1 w/b 16th January 2023
Date: 20th Jan 2023 @ 12:27pm
Another busy week in Year 1! There was great excitement this week when we arrived in school on Wednesday and Thursday to a blanket of snow. The children thoroughly enjoyed exploring the snowy environment and loved perfecting their skills when rolling snow to make snowmen.
In RE this week, we focused on Jonah’s thoughts and feelings having been swallowed by a whale. This story from the Old Testament helped us understand the Christian belief in God’s love and protection because Jonah did pray to God and ask for his forgiveness and God listened and protected Jonah.
In Collective worship with Mrs Mclean and Revd. Sandi we focused on the sentence ‘give us this day our daily bread’. We thought about the ways bread can nourish us and how for Christians Jesus is ‘the bread of life’. In our own lives we considered the people around us that sustain us and comfort and protect us.
After beginning our innovated stories last week, we have been writing sections of our stories over the course of this week with some fantastic results. We have been working on using our text maps to support our writing, applying the writing features we know to include in story writing and focussing on the spelling of key words we just need to know how to spell such as ‘they’ and ‘was’. After finishing our stories and rereading them to check they made sense we began publishing our work using our best handwriting. Everyone seemed so proud of their work which was great to see.
In maths we have been continuing to practice using numbers up to 20 and also looking at how we can use number lines to help us count. We started by looking at number lines and how they are created, we then moved on to looking at number lines with missing numbers and working out which numbers we needed to add. Finally, we looked at blank number lines and used our estimating skills to work out where the mid-point was and which number need to be recorded there. We spent the second half of the week comparing numbers and practicing using a range of vocabulary such as: greater than, less than, larger, smaller, fewer and more. The children showed a great understanding of number and how to compare them to show the value of a number.
During our second session in My Happy mind we focused on the importance of gratitude, how gratitude makes us feel and the ways in which we can show appreciation to ourselves. In these ways we are developing an ‘Attitude of Gratitude.’
Following last weeks work on identifying the differences between fruit and vegetables and classifying them by those that had seeds and no seeds, this week we focused on how they were grown. We discovered that botanists grow fruit and vegetables in one of three places
- On trees or vines
- Above the ground
- Below the ground
We discovered that fruit only grow on vines or trees, but vegetables grow above the ground or underground.
This week in Geography we continued our learning about farms. We looked at navigating our way around the farm using a compass. We could give directions to different parts of the farm using North, South, East and West as directional language descriptions.
During PE this week we have continued our multiskills focus. The children have really enjoyed learning some new games over the last few weeks and have demonstrate great awareness of using the space around themselves when playing these games. This week we played a team game of cones and dishes where the children raced to compete in teams to turn all the cones the right way. We then moved on to perfecting our balancing skills, the children are now becoming experts at balancing and know how to use their arms to help them successfully balance.
During our Forest school session the children enjoyed using natural materials to help create homes for Hermelin. We spotted some fantastic team work, particularly when tying sticks together and the children produced some very elaborate designs, we have no doubt Hermelin would be very comfortable moving in.
We just wanted to say a quick thank you for making sure the children have all been equipped to go out and explore the cold weather. The children loved having the opportunity to go out into the snow with their friends and being able to add some extra layers certainly made them enjoy this time.
We look forward to seeing you all next week.
The Year 1 Team
