Year 1 Blog - Friday 1st December 2023

Date: 28th Nov 2023 @ 6:19pm

Welcome to your Friday blog.

English

We started learning through a new book, TRACTION MAN IS HERE by Mini Grey. Traction Man goes on all kinds of adventures around the house.

Will he escape the clutches of Evil Professor Spade?

Will his trusty friend Scrubbing Brush come to the rescue?

What happens when the Scissor Shark reaches them?

We discussed all the very detailed pictures in the book and drew the characters-even the most ordinary scrap of bacon in the sink is a character in this story! Traction Man wrote us a letter and asked us about our favourite parts of the story. 

We made puppets and used different voices. We told part of the story to our class using the puppets.

We wrote sentences describing what was happening in the pictures. We read our sentences out to the class. We are trying so hard to include finger spaces, capital letters and full stops in our writing. 

Listen to and watch the story here.

Tricky word song. Click here. Practise writing these words.

Phonics

Some of us have been revising oo as in zoo and learning ue as in glue.

Some of us have been learning ow in snow, and ie in chief.

Maths

We started the week by investigating how we could sort objects by different criteria. We learnt the phrase 'in common' to see what was the same about each group.

Then we started our fractions topic. We learnt the words 'part' and 'whole' in the context of fractions, rather than number. We made a house, which was our whole, then identified the windows, doors and roof as being parts of the whole house. We even learnt the word 'denominator' which was quite hard to say! We focused on sharing equally between two people, which meant that we were finding a half.

R.E.

We had a final baptism respond session to celebrate all of the learning that we have done this half term. We recapped why baptisms are important, the symbols used in a baptism and listened to the Bible passage about Jesus' baptism again. We coloured in a picture of a baptism and took them home.

History

This week, we explored the toys that our caregivers (parents and who looks after us) used to play with when they were younger. We looked at Polly Pockets, Tamagotchi, Trolls and Hungry Hippos to name just a few. We thought about whether we would want to play with them now or not. Then we got the chance to play with some toys from the museum. We recognised that these toys were older than our parents' toys because they were made out of wood.

If your child was in the history lesson this week, they will have come home with a sheet to fill out with your help. This is all about their older relatives' (Grandmas/Grandads) favourite toy when they were little. We will be exploring even older toys next week.

Please only fill this out if you can. Do not worry if you will not be seeing grandparents before next Thursday.

Science

Year 1 were so lucky to have Mrs Robinson teach our science lesson this week! She was so impressed with how much everyone has grown up.

We learnt about lifecycles and how animals change and grow over time. We focused on the lifecycle of a butterfly and drew pictures of the changes.

D.T.

We made our own simple slider using the story of The Gingerbread Man. The characters from the story could chase the gingerbread man!

Art

We used pencils to draw flowers onto the foreground of our handprint pictures. Then to make them stand out, we went over our lines with sharpies and whiteboard pens.

Computing

We had a technology safety lesson all about how to behave when using the laptops and iPads in school. We made our own posters to teach others about what to do and what not to do.

French

This week in French, we recapped the colours we learned in last lesson.The children remembered these very well and some children remembered that the t in vert and violet, the c in blanc and the s in gris are not pronounced. After watching and saying which colour parrot flew past, we coloured in the pictures of the parrots and feathers on the pirate hats to show the right colour. We finished the lesson with a game of Splat! Fastest person to point to the colour we heard.

Music

We continued to learn the songs for our Christmas Nativity. We played the rhythms on the claves and wood blocks.

Forest School

We made clay faces. First, we collected natural items in the nature area. We found berries, twigs, leaves, stones and moss. We worked the clay into a circle shape and found a tree with rough bark as we discovered the clay stuck better to these trunks. We designed our own clay face. There was great imagination and creativity shown. 

In our second session we chose our own learning. We built shelters and hammocks, designed and made booby traps, cooked some delicious muddy food and tied knots. we didn't mind the very cold weather. We showed amazing imagination, teamwork, perseverance, resilience and determination. 

Thank you for all the items which you have sent in for the orange Christmas hamper-it's looking like a great prize already!

Home Practice (Sumdog)

Phonics - ue words OR ow (oa sound) words OR ow words

Maths - halves

Counting - Practise counting in 1s, 2s, 5s and 10s, forwards and backwards from different numbers. For example, start at 20 and count in 5s to 50: 20, 25, 30...

Reading - Please try to read each night, even for just five minutes, it makes a big difference!