Year 1 2021-2022

Check our our amazing learning last year!
Autumn 1
Our history based topic this half-term is ‘toys’. We have been exploring toys past and present, changes within toys and even brought our own favourite toy into school! Interlinking with our science topic of ‘everyday materials’, we used wooden pegs to make Victorian Peg Dolls. We also incorporated art into our topic, by creating our own Andy Warhol inspired toy pop art.

In guided reading, we used our skills to examine the book ‘I love you blue kangaroo’, a lovely story about a girl and her favourite toys. As you can see, we’ve been learning a lot about toys! We loved using our prediction skills with this story.

In writing, we began learning how to complete amazing sentence stacking work, starting with our first book ‘Last Stop on Market Street’. We had a super time writing about CJ’s explorations with his Nana. We’ve been trying really hard with our adjectives and verbs this half-term.

Autumn 2
Our geography based topic for Autumn 2 was ‘Home Nations’. We began to learn the names of places in the UK beyond our immediate environment and locality. We explored the UK by looking at individual countries, capital cities, human and physical features, along with comparing the capital cities of London and Brasilia. We used our science knowledge of materials to design our own new landmark. We had some amazing ideas, from zoos to statues to boats!

We also linked our topic to our shape work in maths where we viewed the Earth in 2D on Google Earth and visited the places that we are learning about in creative curriculum.

In writing, we began by studying the book ‘The Queen’s Hat’. We really enjoyed this story as the Queen’s hat blew all over the famous London landmarks that we had been learning about in creative curriculum. It really helped us write some amazing sentences!

This term we also celebrated Interfaith Week in School. Interfaith Week allowed us to promote diversity and gain a better understanding of the different members within our society. We read and told lots of stories, took part in a tiny tasters cooking class making Jewish Boureka and created places of worship.

Obviously, we finished off the term with lots of Christmas festivities! We put up our class Christmas tree, Buddy the Elf visited our classroom and brought advent calendars with him, we made wreaths during our Forest School outdoor morning and we incorporated Christmas into as many lessons as we could. For example, for our last lesson on ‘everyday materials’ in science, we designed our own sleigh for Santa, considering which materials would be best suited for each part of the sleigh.

Spring 1
For the Spring term, our topic focus was ‘Hospitals Past and Present’. During this topic, we have learnt what makes an individual significant, explored and compared the lives of Florence Nightingale, Mary Seacole and Edith Cavell and considered how these individuals have influenced nursing today. We continued our learning on significant women in English, where are focus non-fiction text was ‘Bold Women in Black History’. Here, we learnt about the life of Florence Joyner.

In science, we learnt about the human body and considered the key question ‘where do we go when we are ill or injured?’ so our topic really helped us with this! In PSHE, we were also exploring how medicines can help people stay healthy and that some people need to take medicine everyday to be healthy. We loved sharing our own stories of visits to the doctors and times where we have needed medicine.

Our guided reading book for this half-term was ‘Zog and the flying doctors’ which we loved! We used lots of skills when studying this story, such as predicting, rhyming and sequencing. We also incorporated lots of play-based tasks into our lessons, using art, Lego and our reading corner in every lesson. Look at the images below to see some of our fantastic Zog creations using Lego!

In science we began our new topic of ‘Animals including Humans’. Here we identified and named a variety of common animals such as fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals. We described and compared the structure of animals. as well as named and sorted animals that are carnivores, herbivores and omnivores. We took our learning outdoors for a bug hunt where we explored our Forest Garden and school grounds for different types of minibeasts. We used our magnifying glasses and trays to examine the bugs that we found.

Spring 2
We continued our topic learning on hospitals where we compared hospitals and medicine from then and now, looked at the role of the NHS and even performed some simple first aid (on teddy bears of course).

Our guided reading text explored the life of Mary Seacole where we examined her life in depth and the prejudice that she faced when trying to become a nurse.

In science, we continued our learning on ‘animals including humans’ where we explored the human body, senses and finished off our topic by conducting research on pets held by our class. In this lesson, we were able to show off our knowledge on tally charts which we have explored in maths. In our DT lesson, we considered how to keep our bodies healthy through food and created our own fruit salad.

This half-term it was STEM week and we had a fantastic time. We created our own Joe Wicks workouts, designed planet friendly burgers, planted seeds in different medias and had an amazing visit from Sublime Science.

We also celebrated world maths day by learning about endangered animals. In year 1, we focused on tigers. We completed some length and height work by measuring our tiger leaps and jumps which was super fun. We also created our own lovely tiger artwork.

We finished off the term with a visit from the most adorable ducklings we’ve ever seen and completed some lovely Easter arts and crafts.