Spring Term 2nd Half

In English, we learned ‘George and the Dragon’ using Talk for Writing and we explored the features of this ‘conquering the monster’ tale. The children were fantastic at retelling this story. They had some very creative ideas for innovating their picture maps; substituting characters and some events to create their own story. Our next focus was non-fiction texts and we found out about the features of instructions. We made a royal sandwich for the Queen’s grandchildren and wrote instructions for this, using everything we had learned during our Talk for Writing sessions. In our SPaG sessions, children learned how to use suffixes -ed, -ing, -est and -er, and when each would be used in a sentence. Our children and their families made such a wonderful effort for World Book Day. We shared our favourite books and the teachers in school read stories to other classes to celebrate our love of reading.

We continued to follow our Power Maths scheme and children are starting to work much more independently during table-based activities. We have explored numbers to 20 in depth, looking at: tens and ones; reading and writing numbers to 20; counting one more and one less; comparing and ordering numbers. We have also added and subtracted numbers within 20. Year 1 have become confident using part part whole models, greater and less than symbols, and using drawings number lines to solve problems.

Following our learning about materials in Spring 1, we experimented to find out which materials were waterproof, and which material would make the best coat for one of the Queen’s corgis during our Science Week. The children were so excited and keen to participate during this experiment. We tried to use more scientific vocabulary, and discussed how to make a test fair.

Within our Geography lessons, we started by exploring our local area. The children also named and located the 4 countries and capital cities of the United Kingdom and its surrounding seas. We had a lot of fun exploring the school building and developing an understanding of maps and symbols in keys when we went on a flag hunt around school. We explored geographical similarities and differences between Redscope school and its locality, and a primary school in a remote part of Scotland using a range of maps and photographs. Our focus key concepts discussed this half term were place, scale, and human and physical features.

Spring Term 1st Half

This half term, we have continued to learn about numbers to 10, including; great than, less than, addition, subtraction and place value. We then revisited our learning of 2D shapes and discussed how many sides and corners each shape has. This was a good foundation for the next step in our learning journey: 3D shapes. We named the 3D shapes, discussed their properties and even talked about how each flat face on a 3D shape is a 2D shape. For example, a cube has 6 square faces.

In English, we looked at Toy Story 1 and innovated this narrative to create our own meeting tale of two characters. The children loved having the creative direction over their new narratives. We then wrote an advert for a toy, using persuasive language and specific adjectives to describe it.

For our science lessons this half term, we learnt about different materials, such as, plastic, wood and metal and how every object is made from a material. We then looked at the properties of these materials and discussed how some things are smooth, others are rough, some things are shiny and other things are dull. The children were incredibly enthusiastic about this topic and they were keen to share their new learning with adults at home.

As our topic was Toys and Inventors, we found out all about the invention of Lego and the life of Ole Kirk Christiansen. The children were fascinated that Lego was invented so long ago and were surprised to find out that it had been invented in Denmark.

Finally, we spent lots of time on our observational drawing skills this half term. We discussed what the term ‘observation’ meant and spent lots of time doing this to ensure children were drawing what they could see and not what they thought an object looked like. This cumulated in the observational drawing of a teddy bear.