Year 1 Newsletter

 Year 1 have started the summer term with a little trip to the seaside!  For our poetry writing, we have been using our imaginations and all our senses in our seaside experience days.  Over two days, we went on imaginary visits to the seaside to help us collect vocabulary for our poetry writing. We ‘arrived’ at the seaside and took off our shoes and socks off so that we could ‘feel’ the sand beneath our feet!  We acted out different seaside activities such as walking across the sand, building a sandcastle, collecting shells and pebbles, licking delicious ice-creams and smelling the wafts of fish and chips.   We also watched a virtual seaside walk and listened to lots of different seaside sounds. We ‘paddled’ in the cold sea, shivering as we dipped our toes in the chilly water, feeling the waves splash our legs and noticed that the pebbles were really shiny in the water.  We'll use all our fantastic vocabulary to write our own seaside poems! 

    For this half terms world view lesson, we have been thinking about sounds that we like.  After doing a 'guess the sound' quiz and sharing our favourite sounds, songs and music in circle time, we explored the sounds that the different percussion instruments make.  We chose one we liked and in our groups we used symbols to create a short piece of music.  We performed them to the rest of the class!

 

In our maths lessons we have been doubling and halving and in our first topic lesson, we put our geographers hats on and thought about the question: Should we go to the seaside?

Yes we should go to the seaside because... we can swim in the sea, go surfing, relax and have some peace, have an ice cream and have fun building sand castles!

                                                     

We're not sure if we should go to the seaside because... there are dangerous things on the sand and in the water, you might drop rubbish and it might go in the sea, it is fun but you might go in the sea without an adult and get sucked in by a wave.

                                                     

No we should not go to the seaside because... you could get pinched by a crab, a gull might sweep past and snap your food up,  you might hurt your feet on a stony beach, if we leave rubbish animals can eat it and get really sick. 

                                                     

  

Reception Newsletter

We've had a lovely week back at school and the children have really enjoyed being introduced to their topic of minibeasts. We've had snails in class and the children have tried their hand at some impressive sketching! The children also made their own minibeasts out of playdough and made their own fascinating books about their favourite tiny creature.

 

For our Worldviews lesson this half term, we asked ourselves about our favourite weather and why. To really throw ourselves into the question, we took the children into the immersion room and they imagined they were in the desert! We turned the temperature up high and surrounded the children with pictures of the Sahara and then a completely different, cold scene, with lots of snow ice and put the air conditioning on high! The children spent ages talking about their favourite weathers and then went on to make some beautiful collage suns, researched weather by looking at non-fiction books and wrote about their favourite weather and why.  

Year 1 Newsletter

 We've been busy, busy, busy in Year 1 in our first full week back to school after Christmas!  The children have been so excited by our new topic 'Why is Africa is special place?' especially in our art lesson, where we looked closely at African masks and did some amazing observational drawings of them using oil pastels. 

In our writing lessons, we started a story writing unit and began by investigating tortoises!  We went into the immersion room to watch a video and looked closely at pictures on the walls.  We worked together to think of lots of words to describe how they look and how they move, wrote them on post its and stuck them on the walls!  Following that we began to learn the traditional African story 'How the tortoise got its shell', using a story map and actions.  It was great fun!

 

Finding the difference between 2 numbers has been our focus for maths this week.  The children have worked so hard at this tricky concept and we are so proud of them!

In our first ever World Views lesson we focused on bullying.  We acted out some bullying scenarios and thought about why people might bully others.  In RE we are exploring friendship and what makes a good friend.  We have learnt some stories from the Bible where Jesus was a good friend, such as when Jesus met Zacchaeus.