Year 1 w/b 20th March 2023
Date: 24th Mar 2023 @ 5:01pm
This week it has been lovely to hold parent consultations and have the opportunity to celebrate the progress your children have made so far in Year One. We know the children have been very excited by the prospect that you have had the chance to look in their books and share in their learning and achievements.
In English we have been writing our own information texts about either giraffes or elephants. After carefully looking at the features of an information texts and learning a text about tigers we were able to plan our own text maps using the information we had gathered from the facts about these two animals. We then began writing, ensuring we applied as many Year One writing features as we could. We also tried to apply features such as ‘the power of three’ when giving extra information in our sentences. An example from one information text was: Giraffes eat leaves, plants and grass but don’t eat meat. It was great to see the children taking such care in their writing to use and apply the given features whilst also going back to check their work carefully.
In phonics we focused on e ‘she and he’ and ie ‘terrible tie’. Next week we will have taught all the sounds required by the end of Year one and we shall focus on revising /revisiting taught sounds and reading them in real and nonsense words
This week in maths we have completed our unit on length and height. We enjoyed using rulers to practice measuring different classroom objects in centimetres. Towards the end of the week, we have begun to explore our new unit- mass and capacity. We have looked at balance scales and what happens when we put heavy and light objects at each end. We have also used balance scales to measure the mass of classroom objects in multilink cubes.
In History we compared a Victorian kitchen and modern kitchen. Mrs Mitten visited our class and kindly showed us photographs of her family from the Victorian Era. We used the information we had been given to decide whether we would like to live in a Victorian house. Some of us thought modern kitchens would be much less hard work because of the addition of electricity. Some of us were very shocked that there were no televisions.
Easter garden making and designing our own crosses with images that reflect what Easter means to each one of us has been the focus in RE. Many children have chosen Jesus at the centre of their cross with pictures showing the events of Holy week. We hope to use these designs to make Easter cards next week and also want to take part in an Easter trail focusing on key events in Holy week from the Last Supper to the Resurrection. We shall also launch the use of our new outdoor prayer space.
During art and design we looked at photos and drawings of tigers inspired by the artist Henri Rousseau and then mixed shades of orange to add life to them before adding accents of white and black to add the tigers distinctive features. Next week we shall add final details with paint using fine brush work as well as oil pastels before adding the tigers to our jungle mural scene.
In science this week we finished off our unit bases on materials. The children shared all the things they have learnt over the last few weeks. We were so pleased to hear how much scientific vocabulary the children had learnt using words like flexible, transparent and opaque.
This week in My Happy Mind we continued to explore the module all about relating to people. We enjoyed looking at what active listening looks like and doesn’t look like!
We rounded of our week with animal day to celebrate our love for animals and the book we have been looking at this half term. The children arrived with some fabulous costumes, thank you for your support with this and throughout the day we have enjoyed some different animal activities, making an animal alphabet and a guess the animal book.
Next Friday sadly sees us saying goodbye to Miss Malcolm who has been with us since January. We would like to take this opportunity to thank her for her commitment, dedication and enthusiasm teaching in Year One and she will be missed. We hope Miss Malcolm may be able to come back and visit us in the future before she starts teaching her own class in September. She has a wonderful career ahead of her.
Wishing you a wonderful weekend of slightly warmer weather
Take care.
Mrs Pulle, Mrs Knott , Miss Malcolm and the Year One team
