Year 1 w/b 8th March
Date: 11th Mar 2021 @ 9:01pm
It has been wonderful to welcome the children back into school this week and they seem very happy to be back with their friends and the routines of school life.
Our week started excitedly with the discovery of paw prints leading into the Forest School. After much investigating, questioning and discussion we decided the paw prints were from the big cat family and were most likely tiger prints. Luckily, we found plenty of books to do with tigers in the classroom- both fiction and non -fiction and amazingly although most tigers live in forests, in fiction stories some live in gardens and schools. This led us to read ‘Tiger in the garden’ by Lizzie Stewart. We practised writing questions between characters from the book before we focused on character descriptions. We learned about similes and effective use of adjectives as we planned and wrote our descriptions of Nora (the little girl from the story) and the tiger.
Our phonic focus has been all the igh sounds – (igh) fly high, (i.e.) I like pie, (i-e) nice smile so spelling homework will reflect this on Monday. Please look on Showbie for the spelling sheet on which your child can practise our taught sounds.
Reading assessments have been carried out this week so we can target our teaching accordingly and identify sounds that are secure and those that need closer focus. Please see reading diaries for updates on these assessments.
Handwriting continues on a daily basis for 10 minutes before lunch and continues to focus on capital letters.
Our work in Power Maths has focused on subtraction. Within this unit, children were introduced to subtracting ones, subtracting tens and ones, and crossing ten in subtraction calculations. The children have continued to use the strategies they are familiar with which include, counting back on a number line, subtracting from ten frames and bead strings as well as developing mental strategies to count back.
Topic activities have included Science learning where the children have used their knowledge of materials to name and classify familiar objects. In Art and Design, we have explored the work of Henri Rousseau and his work ‘Surprise’ which features a tiger in a forest. We practised mixing secondary colours- orange, green and purple ready to paint our own forest scenes next week. It was wonderful to see the shades of green the children mixed, and these newfound skills were used to make beautiful cards for Mothering Sunday. Within geography, having focused on our own locality in the autumn term we shall be comparing our daily lives in Brereton with those in Nairobi, Kenya. This week we have compared our school days and addressed any misconceptions. The children have used atlases to locate Kenya and Nairobi and have watched clips from a school in Nairobi. In forest school we enjoyed starting to make giant dragonflies, inspired by our class book, ‘The tiger in the garden’ by twisting and joining willow.
In PE we have started a new unit and for the next 4 weeks the children will be focusing on invasion games. This week we have been practising our ball skills using bounce passes.
In RE, our focus is Resurrection with Easter Sunday now only 3 weeks away. Our key questions:
- What happens in Church at Easter?
- Why was the empty tomb good news for Christians?
This week we looked at objects associated with Easter and used these to help us order the events of Holy Week.
In Collective worship we continued to explore lent. Thinking about lent as a journey, so far, we have considered the things we need to make a journey safe, and these have included a light to show the way and a map to follow in the right direction. This week Mrs McLean taught us a first aid kit can give us comfort and protection. We thought about the people in our own lives that provide us with comfort and protection and then thought of ways we could comfort and protect others. We have written some great ideas and motivations on our prayer tree.
Have a lovely weekend and see you on Monday.
With many thanks
Mrs Pullé and Mrs Lindersen
