Year 1 w/b 18th September 2023
Date: 22nd Sep 2023 @ 4:17pm
This week we have started to read part of our text ‘Major Glad, Major Dizzy’, this has helped us to find out more about the key characters. After stopping at a key point in the text, we have made our own predictions as to what will happen next. The whole class are very excited to read on and find out more next week. We have also, very excitedly, received a letter from Major Glad himself. We obviously had many questions for him, so we looked at how to write question sentences using capital letters, question words and question marks. Next week we will be looking in more detail at our letter written by the solider and we will be learning our first text map of the school year.
In phonics we continue to review some of the teaching from reception and this week we focused on ng and nk or air and ir. Thank you to everyone who has already returned their spellings and sentences. These weekly sheets are a great opportunity to work on phonics, handwriting and sentence writing.
Guided reading continues in full swing and home reading books have been changed. In addition to your child’s home reading book, they are encouraged to swap and select ‘reading for pleasure’ books from our class selection. There is no set day for these books to be changed as they are often enjoyed for different lengths of time. If they haven’t swapped their book in a little while, just let us know!
In maths, we have built on our understanding of numbers to look at finding one more and one less than a given number. We have had a big focus on number formation and ensuring numbers are the correct way round. Each week we complete our learning both in our morning Power Maths lessons and in an additional ‘maths mastery’ session in the afternoon. This week in our afternoon sessions we have explored how the numbers 6, 7, 8 and 9 can all be composed of two parts where 5 is one of the parts and continue to use the language of ‘whole’ and ‘part’.
Next week we will introduce our platform for maths learning at home: Numbots. Numbots is all about every child achieving the “triple win” of understanding, recall and fluency in mental addition and subtraction, so that they move from counting to calculating. Each child in our class will be given a username and password to access Numbots from home. We will put these in the back of their reading diaries. They can also selected their robot characters and choose a name for them. From this starting point they will be able to access the games and activities to support their learning. When accessing Numbots from home (play.numbots.com) they can select either to launch into ‘Story’ and ‘Challenge’ modes. For most effective practice we suggest playing for at least 3 minutes a day, 4 or 5 times a week at home. As they progress, they can collect achievement badges and unlock hundreds of new levels and challenges. In the Story Mode they will also discover parts, helping RustyBot upgrade from Rust to Diamond - so he can shine inside and out.
This week in History we continued to look at the development of transport. We focused our learning on the development of the railway. We started with a team challenge using pieces of wooden train track to build our own track, the children had to think carefully about cooperating with each other to work as a team to complete their track. We then thought about times when we have been on a train and shared some of our experiences. Finally we found out about what it would have been like to travel on a train in Victorian times and compared what was the same and what was different to travelling on a train now.
In Art, we began to look at textures and patterns found in our Major Glad, Major Dizzy text. These were often seen in the changing room décor, wallpaper, and curtain styles. This week we built on this skill of rubbing which we had practiced last week and introduced printing. We could see in some of the pictures that patterns are often repeating so had a go at creating our own prints with a selection of everyday objects. Next week we will introduce William Morris, a very famous artist and print maker before starting our final piece of work.
In science, we identified and named a variety of common deciduous and evergreen trees in our school grounds. We looked for clues that would identify deciduous trees by noticing that their leaves were changing colour and that some of their leaves were dropping to the floor. We gathered evidence from deciduous trees and took photographs of evergreen trees before we sketched
some leaves. If you are out and about this weekend perhaps as a family, you could go on a tree hunt too and see if you can classify the trees you spot?
Within RE we focused on the gifts of harvest in the United Kingdom and thanked God for our plentiful harvest. However, we discovered that some countries have poor harvests and their harvest fail because of climate change. We explored the effect of too much water and too little water in parts of the world and were shocked to see that crops had failed to grow in parts of Africa in particular.
Gymnastic teaching this week built on shapes from last week. The children had remembered all the different shapes they made last week from pike, to straight, arch and dish and used this knowledge to add to jumping. We learned to perform straight jumps and star jumps , pointing our toes when jumping and landing safely on two feet with soft knees. Finally, we performed her jumps from the end of a bench onto the blue mats. Well done Year one gymnasts!
Forest School helped us explore deciduous and evergreen trees. We found leaves from deciduous trees and Mr Simmons taught us how to safely hapa zome. Hapa zome is the Japanese art of hammering leaves to release the dyes onto fabric to make botanical prints. The class worked cooperatively and safely as they created their pictures and collages. However, following all the rain earlier in the week Forest school was rather muddy ! So from next week can all the children please have either waterproof trousers or a spare pair of old jogging trousers to cover their uniform in our Forest School sessions. It is a great idea to bring these in a named carrier bag and then the children have somewhere to put their wet and muddy clothes. Thank you for your support with this.
As you can see, we have had another busy week in Year One!
We hope you have a restful and enjoyable weekend,
Mrs Knott, Mrs Pulle and Wrs Wiggs
