Year 1 w/b 17th April 2023
Date: 21st Apr 2023 @ 3:49pm
Welcome back to the Summer term and how lovely it has been to have lighter mornings and warmer weather. It seems a long time since it was warm enough for the children to play outside without coats.
We were delighted to find a basket of seaside objects in our classroom on Monday. This gave us a great clue about what our new book in English would be all about this half term- boats, shells, the sea, lighthouses, fish and a harbour scene. Next, we enjoyed listening to the new text ‘The Secret of Black Rock’ by Joe Todd- Stanton. We explored synonyms for new vocabulary and focused on the prefix un and how it changes a word to make it the opposite meaning eg- happy-unhappy, pack-unpack, tie-untie. We learned our new model text with actions and focused especially on the direct speech in sentences spoken by the fishermen and women. Finally, we worked in pairs to write book reviews about ‘The Secret of Black Rock’ focusing on likes, dislikes and questions.
This half term, to replace our look, write and check spelling homework we will be sending home real and nonsense words for your children to practice reading. This will be good practice for the phonics screening assessment starting on Tuesday 13th June. Children will read some words on sight but for others please encourage them to recognise ‘Special friends, Fred talk and say the word’. This is the language we use in school so to reinforce it at home will be useful. Please revisit words/ special friends your child finds tricky throughout the week. Thank you to all those families that have been reading these each night. Here is an example
https://schools.ruthmiskin.com/training/view/aeMnurDQ/u7fgGdnp
https://schools.ruthmiskin.com/training/view/GYYj3hX8/s5TGhggG
All phonics sounds for Year One have now been taught so this term we are revising and reviewing taught sounds. This week we have focused on air/are , ear and ir/ur.
Our maths work has been capacity. We have estimated and measured capacity using non-standard units and solved word problems such as if 5 spades of sand filled 1 bucket, how many spades of sand would be needed to fill 5 buckets? This activity encouraged us to count in multiples of 5 with accuracy. Maths Mastery has focused on teen numbers where, for example, ‘13 is made of 10 and 3 , so 10 and 3 make 13’
It was our No Outsiders lesson this week and we read ‘The Great Big Book of families’ by Mary Hoffman and Ros Asquith to begin to understand that families are all different, all diverse- Mum and Dad, Dad and Dad, Mum and Mum, one Dad, one Mum and so on. Next, we played the diversity game for different categories such a transport, celebrations, jobs and homes. We came up with lots of examples for each category and were amazed at the diversity. We now know diversity means different and we recognise we live in a diverse country where differences can and should be celebrated.
In Collective worship ‘No Outsiders’ linked to our focus on Community and flourishing together. We recognised that Zacchaeus was an outsider until Jesus noticed him, cared for him and helped him connect with his community once more. In RE, our key question this half term is, ‘How did the Holy spirit change the disciples at Pentecost?’ To start our new topic we looked at pictures of a sailing boat, kite, hot air balloon and windmill. We recognised that they all needed wind to help them move, so wind helped them change. Next, we looked at a picture of fire and compared ideas about what it does- helps you cook, keep warm, can burn you, can help you see and can melt things. So fire changes things too.
After this we watched 2 short animations about Pentecost- the day the Holy spirit was sent by God to fill the disciples. We were amazed to learn the holy spirit came as wind and fire and helped the disciples talk in many languages to anyone nearby. It gave them the confidence to talk about Jesus, resurrected on Easter Sunday and now ascended to heaven. 3,000 people were baptised that day as they wanted to know God and start a new life.
My Happy Mind teaching on ‘Relate’ concluded this week. We have focused on the importance of Active listening where we have eye contact with the person we are listening to, we smile, avoid distractions and show we have understood. We were all honest about the reality that even adults do not always actively listen. We then introduced the term’ Stop, Understand and Consider’ as a way to help friendship issues. In this way we are thinking about the feelings of others.
In Forest School this week we took the opportunity of the warmer weather to go searching to see which of the mini beast we could spot. The children thought about what kind of habitats they would like and carefully lifted logs and leaves to see what we could find. We spotted worms, woodlice, centipedes and millipedes. We then practiced our knot tying skills to create small mini beast homes. It was lovely to see many of the children using this opportunity to offer help to a friend and work together to hold the bundles of sticks and tie the string.
On Thursday we visited Church for a short service. We were very proud of all of the children and were very impressed with their singing. Reverend Sandi said that she was very impressed with the calm atmosphere in church and we know all of the children enjoyed the opportunity to visit the Church. Thank you to those parents who were able to join us it was lovely to celebrate this occasion with you and the children were delighted to see you.
We took the opportunity whilst we were on our way back from Church to visit the park to start our new DT topic. We looked carefully at the equipment in the park thinking about how it is made and what it is made from. We made some observational sketches of the apparatus in the park and when we got back to class carried out a survey to find out what was the most popular playground equipment. Over the next few weeks we will design our own parks and which equipment we would put in it.
We decided to use Friday morning to focus on Computing. The children used images they had taken a few weeks ago in Forest School to create their own stories. We learnt how to edit photographs, add them into a document and add text to create a story. The children also learnt how to save work and retrieve things they have saved. We were really impressed by their cooperative work with their partners.
What a busy but very productive first week back!
The Year One Team
