Autumn 1 2023

Hello and welcome back! I hope that you have all had a fantastic summer holidays and are raring to go as we enter Year 1!

This half term out topic is “Oh I do like to be beside the seaside” as their topic. Take a look at our class newsletter for more information on the exciting half term that we have planned!

Week 1

This week we have been blown away by the children as they have started their journey in Year 1. The children have all adapted incredibly well to the new routines and timetable, taking each change in their stride and with a smile on their faces. We couldn’t be prouder, a huge well done Year 1!

 

 

Here are some photos of us enjoying our new classroom!

Collective Worship

In Collective Worship we have been focusing on the virtues of Respect and Courtesy and Thankfulness. We have been thinking about how we can live out these virtues in our everyday lives. We are also learning about Mary our Mother and learning how to Pray the Rosary with Mrs Armitage. For October, our class rep for the whole school Religious Development Team has changed our prayer table to have a blue cloth.

 

 

RE

Our topic this half term is God’s Great Plan.

Over the last couple of weeks we have been focusing on the wonderful world that God has made for us. To start our learning we recapped what the children already new about God. The children remembered key people such as Mary, Jesus and Joseph and their important roles as told in the Bible.

 

We then thought about all the beauty in the world and the children imagined the the most beautiful place they had ever been, before using their art skills to paint it.

 

We have been learning the story of the Creation. We learned what God created on each day and we also learned that God rested and blessed his creation on the seventh day. We understand that the story of the Creation is a religious story and can be found in the Bible in the book of Genesis. Genesis 1: 1-31, 2: 1-4 (the story of Creation in seven days) Genesis 2: 5-25 (the story of the creation of man and woman in a beautiful world) The children watched the video, adding actions to each day to help them remember it. The children then sequenced the 7 days in their books and wrote simple sentences to explain what happened.

Our learning journey has moved on to the learning about the Story of Noah. We have been sequencing the story in groups and by ourselves.  We had a fun and active lesson, finding words and deciding if they reflected meaning of the rainbow in the story. We then decorated the words in rainbow colours to embed the vocabulary and reflect on the reason that God sent a rainbow. The children have been very reflective and have shown great compassionate towards other people’s feelings. We have reflected on the meaning of the rainbow that God sent.

We have continued our work on recognising the story of Noah and we have been acting out parts of the story to embed the key vocabulary. We acted out the building an ark, the rain, the flood and the rainbow. We discussed the meaning of the symbol of the rainbow. We have also been making arks in our construction area!

 

 

 

 

English

We have started our English in Year 1 by discussing and writing about what the children have enjoyed over their school holidays. The children have drawn and labelled their ideas before writing simple sentences to explain what they did.

BEEZone

The children been practising their BEEZone. We have looked at our BEEZone working wall, talked about how a sentence needs finger spaces, a capital letter and a full stop. We have been practising writing silly sentences on our whiteboards, making sure we remember finger spaces! The children have enjoyed sharing their favourite parts of the summer holidays. The children have each expressed their thoughts through drawing before writing simple sentences about them.

The Lighthouse Keepers Lunch

This week we have started our focus book “The Lighthouse Keepers Lunch”. The children have learnt new vocabulary such as “concocting” and identified the main characters. The children have also written about their favourite part of the story and predicted how they think Mr and Mrs Grinling will stop the pesky seagulls! We had some great ideas from giving them bird food to creating traps and swapping real food for fake.

 

Our learning journey has moved on to learning about adjectives. We are very creative in year 1 and can think of amazing adjectives to describe nouns! We are trying hard to work together in teams and listen to each others’ ideas. The children played a game describing some of the characters and scenes from The Lighthouse Keeper’s Lunch and they came up with some wonderful ideas! They also matched some adjectives to the pictures so that they could extend our vocabulary and use interesting, well-chosen adjectives in our spoken sentences.

This week the children have began to apply their understanding of adjectives within their own letter writing. Mr Grinling has written to the children asking for ideas on things he could do whilst he is waiting for his food to arrive as he is very bored. The children have come up with lots of exciting ideas and worked hard to use adjectives within their sentences.

Reading in Year 1

We value reading for pleasure and we aim to promote a love of reading in Year 1. The children love stories so much and our story time is a much-loved part of the day. The children really love the reading corner and we have a selection of books including familiar and favourite stories, non-fiction books that link to our learning in other subjects such as Science, French, History and Geography. There are books that help children know the stories from the Bible that we are studying this half term – The Story of the Creation and Noah and the Ark. We really hope there is something for everyone! Our cosy beanbags promote the reading area to be a place to be calm and help the children to understand that we can use reading as a way to unwind, promoting mental wellbeing. Our book area also brings children together – sharing books and interests with our friends! We also have a selection of phonics readers to help the children practise using their phonics when choosing to read for pleasure.

 

 

Spencer the Reading Bear

We also have Spencer the Reading Bear in Year 1. Each week a child gets to take Spencer home, create a book review and take a photo of an interesting place that Spencer read in! Spencer loves to be surrounded by books! He often sneaks out the classroom and can be found reading in interesting and unusual places – like on the top of our climbing frame!

 

Maths

In Maths, we have been recapping FS2 teaching in order to inform us as teachers of the children’s areas of strength and those area that we need to continue to embed. We have done this through number songs, Burn 2 Learn and practical activities. We have had lots of fun and active maths sessions, inside and outside and we have been working on representing numbers in lots of different ways, using lots of different resources. We have been focusing on number patterns and sequences, counting forwards and backwards. These photos show a game, where as teams we had to order numbers and then we shut our eyes, one person took a number or two and we had to work out the missing number – it was super fun!

 

Our learning journey has then moved on to discovering the value of tens and ones in two-digit numbers – right up to 100! Another fun and active maths lesson – creating sticks of ten and representing the ones with unifix.

Our learning journey has moved on to comparison of numbers. We have been recapping some of our FS2 learning and extending our understanding of the language “most” and “least.” The children looked at numerals and different representations of numerals including real life pictures. They compared three pictures to decide which pictures were showing the most and the least and labelled the pictures with this language. The children also learned what the greater than and less than signs look like and compared numbers using these signs! We are working hard in pairs or groups to build our collaborative learning skills!

Our learning journey has been focusing on adding and subtracting, concrete and pictorial representations as well as counting on and counting back on number lines. We have practised in lots of different ways, working in teams to help each other out.

 

 

Science

Materials

This half term our big concept in Science is Materials. We have had a fun and active Science lesson and we have been on a materials hunt around school!

We identified the object and then worked hard to identify the material that it was made from. We worked scientifically to sort materials into groups, based on the material that they are made from. We named lots of materials including; wood, plastic, glass, metal, water, rock, brick, paper, fabric, elastic, foil, card/cardboard, rubber, wool and clay. Linking to maths, we counted the number of objects in each group, identified the correct number card, practised writing the number and then ordered our objects based from the most to least.

Linking with our prior learning in FS2, we have been exploring the woods to describe properties of materials. We had a scavenger sheet with words on, such as “rough” “smooth” “not see through” and we had to explore and then find things that we could describe these words with.

 

 

 

 

 

Topic

Design and Technology

This half term we are experiencing DT for the first time! To start our learning we explored what DT is, learning that it where we explore real life products before creating our own, developing our skills and understanding of different concepts.

We then introduced our first DT topic on food and learnt about how food is mass produced and how this will be different to when we produce food at home.

This week in DT we explored different foods that were in Mr Grinling’s picnic and evaluated them based on all our senses. Some children tried new foods such as peaches and then evaluated which foods they would like to include in their picnic that they are going to build up to making at the end of the half term.

Today the children designed their own sandwich, snack and drink for their picnic. The children used their food evaluation from last week to help them decide what they would like to include.

Over the last couple of weeks the children have been practicing different skills that they will need to make their sandwiches. These have including cutting with a knife, grating and weighing out ingredients. Today we have then applied these skills to make our own sandwiches. We were so impressed with the super skills used, well done Year 1!

Computing

We have started our computing learning focusing on staying safe online through STOP BLOCK TELL. The children were reminded of the importance of STOP BLOCK TELL and then given different scenarios where they had to decide if they would need to use it or not.

This week we have focused on our personal information, what it is and why it is important that it is not shared with strangers both in real life and online.

Today we learnt the importance of always asking to go online so our adults can keep us safe. We also learnt about being respectful following our school TRUST rules both in person and when online.

History

In History we are focusing on the 1920’s. Before we started the topic we revisited our understanding of the past by visiting the school timeline, understanding that History is where we learn about the past and the past is anything before the present. We explored how long ago the 1920’s was by comparing it to events in the children’s lives and learnt that it was over 100 years ago.

This week in History we had a fun and active lesson trying to understand what life was like 100 years ago in the 1920s. We started by exploring what life was like before by finding photographs of the 1920’s and discussing what we could see. We then learnt about changes in technology and what schools were and how they were different to now.

Our historical enquiry question for this half term is “Why are seaside holidays today different from 100 years ago?”. In order to answer that question we need to be able to locate the coast on a map and understand where it is in relation to Wetherby as this plays a factor in why seaside holidays have changed! Today we explored maps for the first time in Year 1 where we located the following: UK, our town of Wetherby and the Yorkshire coast.

Over the last two weeks we have been comparing and contrasting seaside holidays in the 1920’s and in 2023. We have identified distinct differences such as where people travelled to for their holidays and the clothes they wore as well as similarities such as donkey rides and ice creams.

 

MFL

In year 1, we learn to say numbers to ten, the primary colours, some foods, the days of the week, some basic greetings and commands, names for family members and the weather. We also learn about the French artists Henri Matisse and Claude Monet.

We have started our MFL learning journey by exploring the French language. We found out where it was spoken and explored France as a country including French food and the French flag. We looked at where France is on a map, in comparison to the UK and discussed how to get there! Some have us have already visited France.

We have been learning some French songs to learn how to say “hello” and “how are you?” in French! We had a lot of fun to turn to our partners and speaking in French!

We have continued our learning journey and have been speaking in short conversations to each other! We have been saying “Bonjour” “Salut” and “Comment Ca Va?”

Music

In year 1, we learn about rhythms, dynamics, pitch and tempo. We learn about beats and steady beats within songs. We learn how to play solo, in a duet and in an ensemble. We explore lots of instruments and enjoy singing together.

We have been enjoying playing games that warm up our voices. We played the shopping trolley warm up game and found it very funny! Linking to our topic of ‘Oh I do like to be beside the seaside’, we have been listening to and enjoying the song of the same name. We have learned about tempo and about pitch. We have started learning the words and of course have been active in our learning, thinking of actions and having a little dance to the song!

We have been responding to music and listening to “Sounds of the Sea” We discussed how the music made us feel and how we could make our bodies respond to how we’re feeling.

In small groups, we have been creating short, musical patterns. We were tapping out a steady beat in response to music.

 

 

 

 

PE

PSHE

We have been recapping our whole school TRUST rules, as well as learning the new rules, routines and expectations in year 1 and we have to say that the children have blown us away with their maturing attitudes and behaviour. They are considering their friends in decisions and actions and are working together in groups and pairs to achieve a shared goal. Well done Year 1! We have also been recapping our STOP motto. We are using Restorative Practise to discuss any disagreements that arise and this helps the children to feel safe, secure and listened to. It also helps them understand other children’s feelings and point of view.

In  Year 1, we have a big emphasis on the children being happy in school. We do twice-daily wellbeing check ins and regularly offer the chance for children to speak to an adult about their worries, if they wish to. We have a class worry monster, who eats children’s worries, once they are discussed. Our worry monster is a great visual for the children to see their worries being eaten and it helps the children move forward.

 

Pants are Private

We have recapped the important message of Pants are Private and have enjoyed singing along and listening to the message of the Pant-o-saurus song. We created a pair of pants and can explain the message.

Click here to listen to the Pant-o-saurus Song!

 

Dyslexia Awareness Week

We have learned about Dyslexia and we have been thinking about our school motto of “We’re all the same but all different” We have discussed how people with dyslexia find reading, writing and processing difficult but we have also discussed how perseverance and determination people with dyslexia can still succeed with reading, writing and processing. We looked at some famous people with Dyslexia and decided if we try hard at school nothing can hold us back!