Year 1 w/b 8th May 2023
Date: 12th May 2023 @ 4:11pm
This week has included some marvellous writing from Year One. After planning our own imitation stories last week based on the story ‘The Secret of Black Rock’, this week we have planned and written our own journey stories set in a variety of places from space to deep dark woods and even the depths of the ocean. It has been fantastic to see the children refer to our original model text and text map and to also remember to include many of the writer hints and features from the original text. Our working wall really came in handy this week! Features that we have been using in our writing include similes, repeated refrains, story language and even some spoken language.
We move on at a pace with reviewing phonics and we hope you are finding the weekly sheets of real and nonsense words useful to practise with your child at home. If you are noticing they are forgetting certain special friends for example au, are, or, aw, see if you can find other words with this sound in to help embed recall. This is our approach in school and by targeting specific sounds with individual children confidence blossoms and accuracy follows.
Multiplication and division continue to be our focus in maths. In this unit, children will develop their understanding of multiplication as repeated addition, understanding the difference between equal and not equal groups. They will use their knowledge of skip counting in 2s, 5s and 10s and will use concrete, pictorial and abstract representations to help them to find the total of multiple equal groups and of doubles. If an opportunity arises to practise counting in multiples of 2, 5 and 10 at home that would be great as it would reinforce our learning in school. These representations will include arrays, a powerful way of developing multiplicative reasoning. This will then feed into their work on division later in the unit, where we will move onto grouping and sharing.
Our final piece of work on the Holy Spirit allowed us to reflect on the Christian belief that the Holy spirit is a gift from God. It was wonderful to listen as the class explained how they felt the Holy spirit helped them in their lives encouraging them to ‘Love God, love learning and love one another’ and ensure like Jesus, that there were ‘No Outsiders’.
Dodgeball skill development enabled the children to work in four teams this week to play a game and Multiflex were particularly pleased to see great examples of teamwork, use of space and following the rules in Year One.
Our history unit for this half term compares seaside holidays in the past and present. As an introduction Miss Sowter brought a bag of objects associated with seaside holidays before showing us photographs of the seaside from the past 100 years. We all enjoyed looking for similarities as well as differences in the photos and we are very keen to learn more about some very interesting sheds on wheels called ‘Bathing machines.’ Please look out for an email asking for photos of your seaside holidays over time and any your parents or Grandparents may have. We also have a seaside day planned for Monday 22nd May as detailed in the email.
In Forest School this week the children demonstrated their abilities to work in a team. They were set a challenge to cross the stinky bog using planks. With a whole team to help cross the swamp they had to communicate, cooperate and evaluate as they were travelling to make sure nobody fell in. We were very impressed by the strategies that the children demonstrated and there are definitely some strong leaders in the class! We were particularly impressed by how the children listened to each other and thought about how to speak to their friends.
During our Design and Technology lesson this week the children continued their learning about playgrounds. We used the skills we had already acquired to think about how we would design our own playground. They thought about what equipment they would like to include and how they would lay out the playground. They came up with some very imaginative ideas and were already beginning to think about how to build the components of their park.
Following last week’s work in science on identifying and classifying mammals, birds, reptiles, fish and amphibians, this week we looked at grouping animals by what they eat. We recalled our non-fiction report writing on tigers as carnivores, from last term. We discovered other animals that were meat eaters and grouped these before we explored the name for animals that do not eat meat, herbivores, and those animals that eat meat and plants, omnivores. We enjoyed grouping animals, by their diet and comparing our findings with our friends.
Enjoy the sunshine this weekend.
The Year One Team
