Autumn Term 2nd Half

This half term, our topic has been ‘Winter Is Coming’.

We began by focussing on bonfire night. We used our senses to write poetry about fireworks; thinking about how they look, sound and move. The children came up with some fantastic verbs like whizzing, fizzing and whirling to describe the movements of the fireworks. We then had a very special visitor come to tell us all about the Gunpowder Plot... It was Guy Fawkes! He taught the children about everything that happened by getting them to act it out. They enjoyed this a lot and remembered lots of names and facts. He also taught them how to write in a secret code and told them how Guy Fawkes and his friends would have used lemon juice to send a secret message. After this, the children wrote a newspaper report all about the Gunpowder Plot.

We have continued to look at weather patterns and what seasons they are associated with this half term. For example, the children understand that snow usually happens in Winter and that the days are longer as there is more sunlight in Summer. We also discussed seasonal changes like baby animals being born as the weather warms up, blossom and the leaves falling off, for example.

In maths, we are continuing to follow our new ‘Power Maths’ scheme and have been working on numbers within 10. We have introduced addition and subtraction this half term and the children have been very successful in using these terms. We have used a part-whole model alongside the operations which has really developed the children’s understanding. They are also able to use related facts, for example, they therefore know that if 3 + 2 = 5 then 2 + 3 = 5.

We hope everyone had a lovely, relaxing Christmas break and we look forward to starting our new topic, all about toys, this half term.

Autumn Term 1st Half

The children have settled well into year 1 and have had a really successful half term. This half term, we have focussed our learning around two mini topics; Ourselves and Where Have All the Flowers Gone?

In English, we have written about ourselves as babies, using our own photos as a prompt. The children really enjoyed reflecting on themselves as babies! We have been focussing on using capital letters, finger spaces and full stops to write sentences.

During this half term, we also went on a local walk to Barkers Park to do a leaf hunt. We saw lots of different types of leaves and even saw some woodland wildlife like squirrels! When we got back, we wrote a recount of what we had done.

Linking to science, children are now able to distinguish between evergreen and deciduous trees and have learnt about the functions of the different parts of the tree. In art, we painted deciduous trees with their leaves turning yellow and orange and falling off.

We have started a new maths scheme this year called Power Maths. This half term, our learning has revolved around numbers from 0-10 and our emphasis has been on the mastery. The children have learnt to read and write numbers from 0-10. We have looked at pictorial representations; found one more and one less; using a number line and used the language of equal to, more than and less than.