Year 1 Newsletter

 Fun at Frinton!

We were all so excited that we could go on our school trip to Frinton beach, and despite a few drizzles of rain, we had an incredible day.  The children were wowed by their first sight of the sea, were so good at finding all the things on their scavenger hunt and built superb castles!  Having a paddle seemed to be the favourite activity though, jumping over the waves and enjoying see their teachers getting rather wet, brought huge smiles to their faces.  We are so so proud of their fantastic behaviour throughout the day too. 

Amazing Art!

In our art lessons we have been looking at seascapes by Rachet Bennett.  In order to create our own, we have been practising our colour mixing and creating sea and sandy coloured backgrounds to print on.  We used string, scrunched up tin foil and bubble wrap to print onto our painted paper.  We will then tear these papers into strips and pick out ones we like to create our own seascape printed paper collages. 

There has been so much else going on in Year one over the past couple of weeks too!  Pattern making and measuring in maths, learning about the bravery of Grace Darling and writing her story in English, investigating the best material for a lifeboat in science and to top it all off, an awesome sports day!  The children were amazing sportspeople, cheering others on, persevering even when they were worn out and giving every event their absolute best.  We couldn't be more proud!

Year 1 Newsletter

Year 1 have had a super busy two weeks! We have been practising our poem for the Poetry Slam, learning about 3d shapes in Maths and have spent our PE lessons preparing for Sports' Day. We have been practising skills like javelin throwing, jumping over hurdles, bean bag throwing and dribbling a ball with a tennis bat. We've had lots of fun learning some new skills!      

In Maths, the children have really enjoyed learning the properties of the 3d shapes as well. We have been exploring what the shapes feel like and have experimented with sorting and building with the shapes.

As well as all this, the children have wowed all the Year 1 team with their amazing artistic work. We have been looking at colour mixing and the children completed their very own colour wheel, where we discussed primary and secondary colours. We then looked at the artist Rachael Bennett and saw how her painting imitates the seascape. We tried to mix paints to make a sea effect using tints and shades and became artists ourselves!

 

Year 1 Newsletter

Year 1 have discovered a passion for poetry since the whole school poetry fortnight began!  We have enjoyed listening to and watching a range of different types of poems alongside immersing ourselves in an imaginary seaside visit last week!  We did this so that we could collect lots of different vocabulary to help us write our own seaside poems this week.  It was a lot of fun and the children amazed us with their word choices.   We have been busy learning our class poems for the Poetry Slam in a couple of weeks too, trying hard to use clear expressive voices. We can't wait to perform them!

 

In our topic lesson we continued our learning about the Victorian seaside entertainment of Punch and Judy shows.  We discovered that they are still part of seaside entertainment today!  We made our own Punch and Judy characters lolly stick puppets and made up our own little shows in trios. Then we performed them to the class. 

'That's the way to do it!'

In our last science lesson before half term, we revisited our learning about seasonal change.  The last time we made seasonal observations was at the end of autumn and we noticed that our school grounds have changed so much since then!  This time, the trees were full of green leaves instead of brown, red, yellow and orange leaves on the ground, and it was so warm we didn't even need our coats!

We completed a scavenger hunt in pairs and found flower buds, blossom, new leaves growing, insects being more active, feathers, lichen on twigs, leaves that had been munched on and the field was covered in daisies!

  

Year 1 Newsletter

 We had such an exciting day when the ducklings came to visit us in Year 1!  Year 2 were kind enough to let us have them for the day so we can share in their experiences.  We loved watching what the cheeky ducklings got up to when we took them out of the cage and we even got to hold them!  Eddie said, " I feel so lucky because I have never held a duckling before."  We remembered to be calm and quiet so we didn't scare them.  They made quite a lot of noise and tried to peck the tea towel and the mat!  We drew the ducklings and labelled our work with adjectives to describe them. 

  

Miss Kilby shared a video of one the eggs hatching with us, which was incredible!  We realised that we had so many questions that we didn't know the answers to, so we wrote them all down, and after lunch, some Year 2 duckling experts came to see us so we could ask them!  We also watched a very cute video of the ducklings having a swim in Miss Kilby's bath!  

   

It really was such a special day, so we decided that we should write about it in our special diaries.   The children worked extremely hard on their diary writing and used lots of recount writing features, as well as trying to remember all the usual capital letters, finger spaces and full stops!  

In science we have finished learning about animals, including humans, by investigating birds and their main features.  We zoomed in on feathers,  making comparisons between different feathers and what parts of the bird they come from and what they are used for.   We measured some feathers in cm and in cubes, as well as making scientific drawings and describing them. 

 

To complete our science learning journey, we wrote riddles about an animal and the rest of the class had to guess which animal our clues were describing!  The children had to try to use scientific vocabulary in their clues. They were brilliant and yet again, the children worked diligently with their writing.   

Year 1 Newsletter

These past two weeks, Year 1 have loved learning more about life at the seaside. We've been sorting the physical and human features of coastal areas and we have begun to compare life at the seaside nowadays to in the Victorian times. We looked at the new school timeline and watched a fun video all about Magic Grandad who went back in time and visited a beach in the Victorian times. We even had a special treat and got to eat a Hokey Pokey! This is a type of ice cream from the 1900s when people ate it from a piece of grease proof paper. 

 

     

We also had a fantastic day last Monday when we all dressed up for World History Week. The children loved getting in to character as their historical people. We all talked about who we had researched and then wrote about them as well. It was a lovely day!

   

As well as all this, we discovered a dragon's egg on the school grounds! Much excited talk and lots of wonderful writing has been going on since our discovery. The children have made their own diary and are writing detailed accounts of how they felt when they saw the dragon's egg saw and what it looked like. We've been wowed by their writing!

          As scientists,  we has some very smelly learning last week, when we answered the big question...

What makes a fish, a fish?

We watched a video all about the incredible features of fish and what they use them for.  Then we made close observations of some real fish using magnifiers, finding all the different parts that we had seen on the video.   Finally, the children made careful drawings of the fish and labelled them with their special features, such as scales, fins and gills. 

 

Year 1 Newsletter

 Our wonderful resilient Year 1 children have settled in back to school brilliantly and have been really busy over the past week!  

They have been incredible word detectives in our English lessons, looking carefully for different features of diary recounts, after Mrs Smith and Mrs Witney read from their diaries last Monday.  They had brilliant sharp eyes and found them all!  They are very excited about writing in their own homemade diaries after making the front covers using a special art medium called Brusho, in an art lesson.   

In the first PE lesson of a new unit, the children have been learning some new tennis skills!  They were fantastic and everyone persevered with trying to improve.  

   In Science we have been building on our learning from before Easter by comparing the bodies and other features of amphibians and reptiles.  The children amazed us with how much they had remembered about these two family groups!  They chose an animal from one of the groups and made it out of clay, using tools to add details. 

Year 1 Newsletter

 Wonderful Year One!

The children in Year 1 have continued to astound us with the outstanding standard of home learning that we have received over the past couple of weeks.  Though they have not always found it easy, they have been resilient and persevered and we could not be prouder of them.  A huge thank you again to the parents for your support and feedback that has enabled us to adjust and improve our remote teaching.  Here is some of the incredible work that our extra special children have done. 

Over a week, the children wrote their own version of the traditional African story 'How Tortoise got his shell'.  They made a few changes to the original which showed their wonderful imaginations!

Here are Archie's, Theo A and Miri's stories. 

 

Archie

Theo A

Miri

After our story writing, we moved onto information writing all about African elephants.  The children were asked to watch some videos and be elephant detectives, looking and listening out for what elephants use their ears, tusks and trunks for.  Then they had to label a picture and many children also wrote explanations too!  At the end of the week, the children had a go at answering questions in an African Elephant quiz and used their research to write their own quiz questions for us to answer!!  

We have LOVED answering their questions, though not always getting them right! 

Well done Year 1!  Your quizzes were fabulous and great fun to try to answer! 

Ariana made notes on the uses of the ears, trunk and tusks.

   

Darcy and Milla wrote excellent explanations!

Here are some of the brilliant African Elephant quiz questions written by Year 1.  We learnt a bit about different types of questions beforehand such as multiple choice and true or false. 

How many can you answer?

Where do elephants live?  England, Africa or Antarctica?

How many hours do elephants eat for?  14, 18 or 16

What do elephants use their tails for?

How big is an elephant brain?  3kg or over 5kg

Elephants use toothpaste. True or false?

Elephants use mud as sunscreen.  True or false?

What do elephants eat?  leaves, meat or cornflakes?

When can a baby elephant walk?  After 1,000, 000 days, after 1-2 hours or when they are 12?

Continuing with our fabulous Africa topic, the children have been learning about paper collage and using different tearing and cutting techniques.  Here are some of their beautiful African animal art work. 

 

Sebastian O's Lion                                          Frankie's Lion

Eva's Zebra

 

   Rylee's Giraffe

Ricardo's Tortoise

Theo G's Cheetah

Learning about the senses has been the name of the game in our science home learning and the children have undertaken taste tests this week!

Layla all prepared and ready to go!

      

I wonder what Louie was trying?              Roya was not keen on the lemon!

 

Brilliant recording from Finley and Ariana!

They have also been busy with different balancing and jumps in PE, responding to African music and learning about pulse in music, thinking about belonging in RE as well as doing some extra learning of their own too!

You are awesome Year 1!  

 

Different types of jumping by Eddie and Luke!

  

Logan, Poppy-Rose and Frank clapping to the pulse of Hot Cross Buns!