Year 1 Newsletter

What a busy week in Year 1! As part of our forest topic, we received an email saying, "The forest has got to go!". In our talk trios, we first considered reasons for why the forest might be destroyed. The children thought it could be to extend the car park, build a gym and swimming pool or to make paper from the wood.

Next we considered reasons to keep the forest. The children said that they love going to the forest and climbing trees and they learn new things in the forest. They were concerned about the animals who would be affected if the forest was cut down.

Finally the children voted with their feet to say whether they thought the forest should go or the forest should stay.

In Science, Zogla visited us again wondering how flowers stand up on their own. We took a cutting of a flower and tried to make it stand up but we couldn't make it work! In our talk trios we had lots of ideas for why this was. We realised it's because plants need roots to anchor them in the soil. We studied the roots from a viola, a dandelion and a carrot!

We noticed that roots look different and learned that there are tap roots and fibrous roots. Tap roots, like carrots and dandelion roots, are long and thick and have fine hairs sprouting from them. Fibrous roots, like those of a viola, have lots and lots of very thin hairs, with no main thick root.