Year 1 w/b 6th February
Date: 15th Feb 2023 @ 7:46am
W/b 6th February
This week it has been Children’s Mental health week and the theme has been, ‘Let’s connect’. To introduce the theme, we looked at a single piece of Lego and agreed to build anything we needed more pieces to connect with it to build something wonderful. Next we stood in circles holding hands with a hula hoop over one of our arms. We had to work together to pass the hula hoop around the circle whilst still holding hands and keeping our connection. Each team was successful in passing the hula hoop because they worked as a team encouraging each other and using their problem solving skills effectively. Finally, we listened to ‘The Invisible String’ by Patrice Karst and explored our invisible strings that connect us to family, friends, pets and even people that have died or that we no longer have much contact with. We drew ourselves in the middle of coloured paper and drew strings to all those people in our lives that keep us connected and help us feel loved . Listening to the song ‘We’re All In This Together’ from High School Musical as we worked on our invisible string pictures reinforced the importance of connection and team work. Please now continue to enjoy participating in some of the wellbeing challenges sent out this week. These may be a lovely focus as we head towards half term.
Innovating letters from Hermelin has been our focus in writing this week and we have been delighted with the children’s independence using their text map and working wall to aide their spelling, grammar and punctuation. We shall look forward to sharing some of this writing with you before half term as the children have enjoyed publishing their letters for our Proud Moments wall .
In Phonics, our target sounds have been ear, hear with your ear, and ure, it’s not pure. We have also started re assessing how many of the taught sounds the children can recall as a pure sound and in words both real and nonsense. This will help us determine who is ready to move to a new colour band / set of books and who still needs time to practice the sounds and their speedy reading on their current book colour.
In maths our work on subtraction and addition within 20 continues. It is important the children see the relationship with the part- part -whole model and the family of facts . So if the whole is 12 and the parts are 8 and 4 , then the family of facts are:
8+4=12
4+8=12
12= 8+4
12=4+8
12-4=8
12-8=4
8=12-4
4=12-8
We have worked practically and on white boards to reinforce this learning. This is good reinforcement that the total can come at the beginning of the number sentence as well as at the end.
In Collective worship we have been introduced to a slight change to our vision and Values. Our Vision remains ‘ To Love God, Love Learning and Love One Another’ but we do this so we can all ‘Flourish’. This second part, the ‘Enabling Everyone to Flourish’ is new and links well with the vision for the Church of England. Our 8 values that underpin our vision remain, but are under 4 new headings:
- Wisdom
- Hope
- Community
- Respect
This week we focused on respect and the teachings from John Chapter 13 v3-7 where Jesus washes his disciples feet. We have filled our classroom door with hearts full of the ways we show respect to each other and God.
In Design Technology we made smoothies this week. Having previously investigated what fruit and vegetables are, and explored them by looking, feeling, smelling and tasting them, we designed our own smoothies. This week we carefully prepared all the fruit and vegetables using clean hands and the tunnel method of cutting. Having blended 3 types of smoothies we enjoyed tasting what we had made. Finally, we evaluated what we had discovered.
- What went well?
- Did we enjoy the smoothie?
- What were the challenges in the making?
- What would we do differently next time?
We finished with a quiz to assess the children’s understanding of their fruit and vegetables.
On Tuesday we went on our visit to a local farm in Brereton. We were shown around the farm by the owners Farmer Wendy and Farmer Derrick and they introduced us to the cows and very tiny baby calves, only two weeks old. We also looked at some of the farm buildings including the milking parlour and the machinery in it. It was very interesting to see the different foods eaten by the cows including the bucket of silage! Finally, before leaving we all got the chance to sit on the tractor and even got to beep the horn. What a fun and interesting afternoon out to support our learning in Geography! The children were a pleasure to take to the farm, showing exemplary behaviour and great enthusiasm when representing the school.
In PE this week we recapped on our work about balanced and then moved on to practice our agility. We played some fast-paced games to warm up, thinking about using the space effectively so not to bump into other children. We then played some team games where the children raced to be the quickest team to collect all the treasure, there was great excitement to see who had filled their treasure chest first!
In Science we have continued our learning about materials. We reminded ourselves of the different materials that area used to make everyday objects and thought about their properties. We used 2 sorting hoops to sort the objects, for example with the heading hard and soft deciding which hoop the material belonged. We also had a look at how some objects such as paint brushes are made up of a number of materials and how they would need to go in the middle when sorting as they are both soft and hard.
Next week, we shall focus on Computing and on Tuesday it is our ‘Detective Day’. This will be a non-uniform day but you do not need to buy anything special. Perhaps you could make yourself a name badge and magnifying glass or wear a detective hat? We shall be focusing on how to make a moving picture. We shall discover how to make parts of a picture move using vertical and horizontal levers.
Warm wishes
Mrs Pulle and Mrs Knott
