Year 1 w/b 27th March 2023
Date: 31st Mar 2023 @ 4:11pm
We have enjoyed a super final week of learning before the Easter holidays. This week we have been celebrating British Science week and we have been very lucky to have three special visitors. Thank you so much to the parents who have come into school to join us to talk to the children about their jobs relating to STEM. The children absolutely loved having visitors in the class and were inspired to think about their future ambitions! This year the focus of British Science week is ‘Connections’ and we have been conducting a series of experiments to find out about connections in different ways. We particularly enjoyed taking our own fingerprints and looking at the patterns to see what was similar and different to our friends. We also created our own string telephones to help us connect with each other and carried out an experiment with skittles to investigate what happens when the colours make connections.
This week we have also been very lucky to have had two separate performances in school. On Tuesday we watched a production of ‘Wind in the Willows’ and on Wednesday we watched ‘Scrooge’. Both were very energetic and interactive performances and it was lovely to see the children so entranced. Inspired by the performance of ‘Wind in the Willows’ in the morning, we used our forest school time to create some of the characters and buildings from the story and even acting out some of the sections of the story.
In preparation for Holy week starting this Sunday each day this week we have read, reflected and prayed about the days that led to Jesus’ crucifixion and Resurrection. Looking at the paintings of artist Nebiyu Assefu has helped us think about the emotions and feelings of Jesus and his disciples during this time.On Maundy Thursday, at the Last Supper, Jesus shared bread and wine with his disciples as a way to help his disciples remember him. As we shared bread in our class we thought about Communion services today that still share bread and wine to remember Jesus. As Jesus prayed in the garden of Gethsemane, his disciples fell asleep. Jesus was afraid but he prayed. We had pieces of bubble wrap to keep things safe and as we popped the bubbles we thought about our own fears and how they could be taken away. Judas then betrayed his friend with a kiss and Jesus was arrested and taken away. We thought about times when we had been betrayed or let down by friends- it makes us feel mixed up. We reassembled pictures of friendship in groups and agreed it is good to be back together with friends. Next, we looked at Assefu’s paintings of Jesus’ judgement. Even though there was no reason to find Jesus guilty, the chief priests and elders decided Jesus must die. We wondered how we would feel to be unfairly judged. We looked at pictures of famous people and places and compared our judgements on them. Is it fair to make judgements on people or places we do not know?
Good Friday was the day Jesus carried our burdens. He carried his own cross to Golgotha where he was crucified between two thieves. As we looked at scales weighed down, we thought about Jesus weighed down by carrying everyone’s sins. We thought about the things in our own lives that can weigh us down like worries about ourselves and people we love. As Jesus died, he offered forgiveness to a thief next to him on a cross. Forgiving people that have hurt us can be hard but if Jesus can do it as he dies on the cross perhaps we to can forgive others. On white boards we wrote things we were sorry about. In rubbing them away we thought about fresh starts. Forgiving people is like giving them a fresh start.
Finally, we focused on hope and the empty cross. On Easter Sunday, Jesus was resurrected, he was alive again. Our Easter gardens with the stone rolled away revealing an empty tomb and new life growing all around reminds us of the joy, light and peace of that first Easter morning over 2000 years ago. The start of Christianity and the Church as we know it today.
Our final piece of work in Art and Design involved us adding details to our tigers. We used a combination of oil and chalk pastels to highlight the tigers facial features and cut slithers of white to add whiskers. The tigers were then added to the jungle background created a fortnight ago. We are very pleased with the finished results and think it looks fantastic hanging in the centre of our classroom.
In phonics this week we have learnt our final sound y (happy family) and have been reviewing some of our most recent sounds. We were also delighted to spend time assessing children’s progress in reading this week. It has been very pleasing to observe the improvement in children’s recall of special friends and how this has helped the pace of their reading. Many of the class have moved to a new book level, with others just needing to consolidate a few more sounds. Please do keep reading over the Easter holidays so this progress and enthusiasm remains.
We concluded our History unit thinking about homes from the past this week. We took the children on a walk around Brereton to look at the different houses we could spot and some of the different styles of buildings. We were amazed to see how old the pub was! We then returned to the classroom to carry out a short quiz to show all our learning about homes from the past.
May we now take this opportunity to wish you all an incredibly happy and blessed Easter. We hope you enjoy the Easter cards your children have created for you, and we shall look
forward to seeing everyone back in school on Monday 17th April when we have another interesting and creative half term of learning planned.
Thank you for your continued support.
Mrs Knott, Mrs Pulle, and the Year One team
