Year 1 w/b 28th November 2022
Date: 2nd Dec 2022 @ 3:33pm
Christmas has well and truly arrived in Year One and happy Advent to you all! It was lovely to see so many of you at our Christmas Fair last Friday. Elfridges was certainly very busy, and the children have chosen some lovely gifts to wrap for special people in their lives. Our Nativity moves on apace and we shall be delighted to share this with you next week. Can we please have all costumes into school by Monday 5th December at the latest. We shall be performing a dress rehearsal for the school on Tuesday 6th December before you come and watch on either Wednesday 7th at 2pm or Thursday 8th at 6pm. We also have the excitement of our theatre to see Alice in Wonderland on the afternoon of Monday 5th December. We shall be returning to school for approximately 5.15pm, depending on traffic.
Our English focus has now moved onto information texts. We have started to learn the vocabulary and actions for an information text on Beegu. This report is written in sections and focuses on:
What Beegu looks like,
Where Beegu comes from
What Beegu eats
An amazing fact about Beegu
We have explored different sentence starts such as Surprisingly, Interestingly, did you know?
We have coloured coded the different sections of the text before we innovate next week and use our model text to structure an innovated one to describe Beegu’s friend.
In Phonics we have enjoyed focusing on split digraphs – a-e (make a cake) and e-e (Go Pete and Steve). There was great excitement in exploring these ‘chatty friends ‘that need another sound between them when they are written. We have also completed our Autumn 2 phonics assessment this week so many children may have moved book colour whilst others need a little longer to reinforce certain taught sounds. We have been delighted with the children’s progress both in their reading and writing this term. Thank you for continuing to read at home and for your comments in the reading dairies when reading has been completed and enjoyed.
Our focus in maths is now 3D and 2D shape. This unit introduces children to 2D and 3D shapes and their properties. Children will learn to name the different shapes and identify the features that determine how they are classified. By exploring the similarities and differences, children will make the distinction between 2D and 3D shapes. Throughout the unit, shapes are presented in different orientations. This helps children focus on the specific mathematical properties of the shapes and secures their understanding of classifying 2D and 3D shapes. They will also learn to identify individual shapes within composite shapes (where several shapes are joined together) and explore the relationship between 2D and 3D shapes.
We have also assessed children’s maths understanding this week. The first paper assessed mental arithmetic skills and the second was a maths reasoning paper. The papers assessed all the children’s learning in Year One so far this year and the results have been very pleasing indeed reflecting very good progress since the last assessments in July.
On Tuesday, we continued the My Happy Mind unit ‘Celebrate.’ In lesson three, we recapped the 5-character strengths; love and kindness, bravery, and honesty, exploring and learning, teamwork and friendship and love of life and our world. We compared our own character strengths and identified those we saw in others and agreed it was encouraging to tell someone when we saw they showed a particular character strength. We shall practise this strength spotting in the weeks leading to Christmas. Finally, we sang the ‘We are Wonderful and Special’ song adding our own actions
During PE the children continued their gymnastics lessons practicing a range of different balances. They also worked an building their core strength using a range of different activities.
The children really enjoyed our Science lesson this week. We thought about all of our different senses and went on a sense walk around our school grounds to see what we could see, hear, smell, touch and taste. The children were very observant and were able to identify which body parts were associated with each sense.
On Tuesday in our Forest School session we got wrapped up warm and went outside into our forest area to create homes for Beegu. The children were very imaginative with their designs to create a home for Beegu and showed great team work, working with their partner. They were able to use a range of materials and we were very impressed with their ability to lash the branches together and tie the string. Just a little reminder as the weather turns colder, please make sure your child has wellies in school and hats, gloves and anything to keep warm!
Our Design technology lesson was embraced with enthusiasm. Last week the children chose their fabric and attached their pattern (Beegu’s friend) This week they have been given wadding to place between their 2 bits of fabric and have used the joining technique they practiced a couple of weeks ago eg stapling, gluing or safety pinning along the edges of the fabric to join the two pieces together. Next week, during Space Day, we shall add the finishing touches to our comforters for Beegu and we shall evaluate our designs and joining techniques.
We are very excited to be preparing for our ‘Space Day’ next Friday. We can’t wait to see all of your costumes. Remember you don’t need to buy a costume we love to see DIY costumes made from things you have in your home.
Thank you for your continued support and enjoy your family preparations for Christmas
Mrs Pulle, Mrs Knott and the Year One team
