Year 1 w/b 7th February
Date: 11th Feb 2022 @ 5:32pm
Our work in English this week has involved us writing our innovated letters to someone from the Hermelin story explaining where their missing belonging had gone. We were so proud of the children’s determination, focus and skills in composing their letters. It was great to see clear sentences with correct punctuation, capital letters for names and new sentences and imaginative word choices. Additionally, we have been practising re reading our work and editing and many children are now doing this independently. Children could identify in their own writing the features of a letter- the sequencing conjunctions, punctuation, conjunctions for joining sentences which included because and even some alliteration. Later in the week we also wrote book reviews on Hermelin considering our likes, dislikes, puzzles, and patterns. In Phonics, our focus sounds have been aw (yawn at dawn) au (Paul the astronaut) and are (care and share)
Having completed our final lesson on addition to 20 we have moved onto subtraction to 20. We have started practically using ten frames, bead strings and number lines and tracks to calculate our subtractions. The children were reminded to count back not forward on a number line as the answer in a subtraction is always going to be less that the whole (the number you are subtracting from). Towards the end of the week we introduced a new strategy for subtracting which many children found quite tricky. This strategy involved taking away the tens then the ones. Here is an example: 17-15= . So, we could do 17-10 =7 then 7-5 =2 so 17-15=2. The two parts of this make it trickier than counting back on a number line but once grasped it makes subtracting larger two-digit numbers much easier. As the numbers we use increase, we need to look for more strategies and alternative strategies to calculate and check answers.
This week has been Children’s Mental Health Week and the theme has been ‘Growing Together’. We have been looking at the Five Ways to Wellbeing are and how we can use these to help us to grow. They are to: learn, notice, connect, be active and give. Mental Health is the way we think and feel about ourselves and the world around us. It affects how we cope with life’s challenges and stresses. This week we have been involved in assemblies to talk about good mental health and things we can do to develop our own mental health. We have also completed activities around this theme. We started with an activity called ‘Support Balloons’ where we considered people in our ‘Support Balloons’ as people in our lives who help us to grow. People we might turn to when things get tough or we need support. This could include parent, carers, siblings, teachers, coaches etc. The second activity was called ‘Look How We’ve Changed!’ which started with us reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar. We thought about some of the changes the caterpillar went through during the course of his life. This then led us to think about all the changes and things we have learnt since we were born e.g. learning to walk, to read and even to do tricky maths. A lot has happened in 5/6 years!
In Collective worship this week we have been lucky enough to have explored the knitted Bible scenes on loan from St George’s United Reform Church in Hartlepool. These comprised 34 scenes, 14 from the Old Testament starting with creation and 20 from the New Testament finishing with Jesus’ resurrection and breakfast on the beach with his disciples. There was much awe and wonder as Year 1 looked at all the scenes and a fantastic recall of stories from the bible and more importantly their teaching for Christians today. The class chose their favourite scenes to draw and explain why they had chosen that particular story/ scene.
Our focus for our Detective Day has been investigating, designing, making, and evaluating smoothies. What combination of fruit and vegetables makes the tastiest smoothie? After investigations earlier in the week exploring the feel, small and taste of a range of fruit and vegetables we chose to make of 3 smoothies:
Carrot, pineapple, and mango
Spinach, banana, grapes, and apple
Cucumber, banana, and strawberries
We learned how to safely cut the fruit and vegetables into pieces for the blender before blending them and tasting. Finally, we evaluated we had made thinking about what went well and what we would change another time.
Our final science lesson this half term on senses focused on investigating what was in the bag. Using only our senses of smell, touch, look and finally taste we made our predictions and compared which sense was the most useful in helping us reach our conclusions. Hopefully, by the time you have read this, you will have heard all about it!
Forest school had a musical theme as Year 1 gather materials from th forest floor that could be combined to make sound. We had drumming and scrapping instruments as well as some tuneful singing.
We have also been very lucky this week to have a visit from two coaches from the Jam Coding team. On Wednesday afternoon they came in to work with us and give us the opportunity to try out coding on laptops. We started by looking at the parts of a laptop and how to use them. We worked on our track pad skills in a paint program before moving on to Scratch Jr where we made our own sprites, backgrounds and started to create algorithms to make the sprites move. It was so much fun!
In Geography we have been looking at the four seasons and how the seasons affect time on the farm. We looked at typical seasonal events that happen on a farm and used these to create season wheels to depict the events on a farm in different seasons e.g. new baby animals in string, crops ripening in summer, harvest in autumn and bringing animals indoors in the winter. We can’t wait to bring all of our learning together next week without trip to the farm.
In Music this week we relistened to Air on a G string by Bach. If you would like to listen here is the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzlw6fUux4o
We hope you can all enjoy a lovely weekend and we look forward to seeing you all again on Monday for our final week together before half term beckons.
Many thanks
Mrs Pulle and Mrs Lindersen
