Year 1 Class News
Watch this space fill up with our amazing learning this year!
Autumn 1
Year 1 have made a fabulous start to this school year and we have some fantastic learning to share with you.
In English, we have been focusing on ‘Last Stop on Market Street’. We have loved learning about CJ and Nana’s journey together and writing some amazing sentences all about it. We’ve been using adjectives and adverbs, and practising using our full stops, finger spaces and capital letters.
In Maths, our current topic is Place Value within 10. As you can see below, we have been learning through a range of mediums and going outside wherever possible!
Our first focus topic this year has been Toys, within our history lessons. We had many discussions about our favourite toys and even brought these into school to share with our friends. We learnt about toys from a range of eras, including the Victorian Era, and made our own wooden peg dolls. We also invited our parents and grandparents into school to share some of their toys from when they were little with us. It was so much fun!
Moving on, we began our Science week where our topic focus has been Seasons and Weather. We examined the four seasons, days of the week and months of the year, the weather, hibernation and why day becomes night. We loved using the book ‘Trees’ in our lessons to explore how trees change during the seasons. See below our amazing hedgehog hotels that we built as part of our hibernation lesson.
In Art, our first weekly block was based on ‘Drawing’. Here, we focused on mark-making and learnt how to cross hatch. For our end product, we had to draw an animal using our mark-making tools. We linked our learning in science to this, creating our artwork on hibernating hedgehogs.
We then began our DT week based on Wheels, where we designed, constructed and evaluated our own toy cars!
Autumn 2
What a fantastic Autumn 2 term we have had on the build up to Christmas!
We began our new English unit, a poem all about Bonfire Night. We had lots of experience days during this unit where we watched some firework displays (online of course) and created our own firework art. You can see pictures of these below. We learnt a lot about how to structure our own poems and finished our unit by writing our own poem about Christmas Eve!
In Maths, we began our addition and subtraction topic where we were introduced to part/whole models. We took lots of our learning outside for maths, especially when we needed to draw huge number lines! Before Christmas, we began our short shape topic. We loved learning about 2D and 3D shapes, comparing them, and exploring patterns. We also added as many aspects of Christmas into our shape lessons as we could!
Our Science unit we have been exploring plants. During this, we made planted our own cress seeds. We took our own home but made a couple extra ones that we could keep in school to examine over the coming days. See us planting them in our pictures below.
We had a computing week this half term where we examined moving a robot and programming! We loved giving the robot commands in our classroom. We then examined on screen programming using the app ScratchJr on our iPads. We had lots of fun changing our characters and backgrounds, giving them different instructions and commands, and adding different sprites.
In DT, we had a Christmas Enterprise week where we designed, made and evaluated Christmas cards to deliver to members of our community. We decided to create cards using a pop-out design inside. It was tricky at first but they look amazing.
We finished off the term with a wonderful Christmas party where we danced the morning away in our hall before moving onto a Christmas breakfast brunch with our friends in EYFS.
Spring 1
What an amazing half-term we have had!
In English, we explored two units of writing – poetry and science fiction. Within our science fiction unit, we learnt lots about the moon and you will see some of our fabulous moon artwork in the images below.
In Maths, we moved onto Place Value within 20 and Addition & Subtraction within 20. We have used a lot of resources during these topics through a lot of practical lessons!
We began our new history topic of ‘Hospitals Past and Present’ where we explored the lives and work of Florence Nightingale and Mary Seacole. We loved learning about the two nurses and the impact they have had on hospitals and nursing.
In Art, we explored printmaking with everyday objects, inspired by the work of Karen Lederer. It is safe to say we had a lot of paint-covered lego after this lesson! In DT, we moved onto our fruit and vegetables topic, where we decided to design, make, (eat), and evaluate fruit kebabs. Lot’s of fruit tasting took place which we loved.
Towards the end of our half-term, we began our RE block where we learnt about a new religion, Judaism. Throughout the spring term, we are learning ‘Who is Jewish and how do they live?’.
Spring 2
It has been a quick but delightful half-term!
In English, we examined how to make information booklets for a theme park, based on a fiction Ice Planet park. We loved designing our rides and coming up with some fabulous names for them using our knowledge of alliteration and rhyming slogans. Following this, we examined a classic narrative ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ which inspired some highly creative and descriptive language.
We began learning all about measurement in maths when we began our topics ‘Length and Height’ and ‘Mass and Volume’. We engaged in some very practical and creative activities during these topics and loved taking our learning outdoors!
This half-term, we had an amazing STEM week. The theme for STEM this year was ‘Connection’s and we had a brilliant time working our way through each aspect of STEM. We had some exciting team-building activities which you can see in our pictures below. We read a range of stories together inspired by STEM which we think you would love. Our favourites were ‘Ada Twist Scientist’ and ‘Izzy Gizmo’.
In RE, we continued our learning on Judaism, specially focusing on some different festivals including Hanukkah and Passover. We sampled some donuts which are commonly ate during Hanukkah!
In PSHE, our focus for this half-term has been ‘What can we do with money?’. We have learnt where money comes from, the difference between want and need, and how and why people save their money. We ended our unit by making our own money boxes.
We began learning about different continents, countries and oceans within Geography. We loved this unit and still like to sing our continents and oceans songs every week!
We have been learning how to paint digitally in computing where we have been inspired by a range of artists, including Mondrian and Kandinsky. You can see some of our creations below.
What a lovely half-term we have had and can’t wait to see what we’re going to be learning about in the summer term! 🙂
