Year 1

World Book Day 2022

This week, we celebrated World Book Day. We participated in an author and illustrator session, made our own origami books, listened to an audio book and made our own Supertatos! We listened to 'Supertato Bubbly Troubly' and had a go at popping the bubbles as the characters did in the book. At break time we went on a Where's Wally hunt and came to school dressed as our favourite book characters. The day was a lot of fun and we went home to start our 100 Days of Reading challenge! 

The Jungle Dance

We are reading the story, Giraffes Can’t Dance by Giles Andreae, in English. For our creative hook, we all went to the Jungle Dance, just like Gerald the Giraffe did. In order to fit in, we all made ourselves an animal mask. Just like the animals in the story, we sat around our ‘campfire’, sang and played instruments before enjoying our snacks! It was a lot of fun!

Online Safety

As part of our PSHE lessons, we have been learning how to find information safely on the internet. We learnt how to use a search engine to find information and considered how we can keep ourselves safe online. We also learnt how emails work and how to send an email. We explored different types of emails we might receive and learnt how to tell which emails are safe and which we should delete.

Freeze Frames 

In our current English unit, we are learning to write a recount in the form of a diary entry. For the imitation phase of our Talk for Writing teaching sequence, we pretended to be people living in London in 1666. We used what we had learnt about the fire to think about what they might say. We practised being the characters and saying the things they would have said before creating a freeze frame which we annotated with speech bubbles.

Samuel Pepys' Diary 

As part of our topic on the Great Fire of London, we learnt about Samuel Pepys. He was alive at the time of the fire and kept a diary of the things he observed. We learnt a little bit about life in the 1600s and discovered that people wrote with quill feathers dipped in ink. We had a go at writing with a quill to understand how Samuel Pepys wrote his diary.

Natural Art 

On a very cold afternoon, we went for a walk around our school grounds to collect materials for our natural art pictures. We enjoyed exploring and learning about the different types of nature we have in our school grounds. Once back in class, we used the materials we had collected to make pictures in our Year 1 garden.

Christmas Disco

Our Christmas disco was a lot of fun. We enjoyed dancing and singing and playing party games!

Christmas Dinner 

We all enjoyed our Christmas dinner in the last week of term. We tucked into a delicious Christmas meal of roast turkey with all the trimmings. When we returned to class for the afternoon, there was another surprise – Father Christmas had been and left us a present under the tree!

Bodhi Learning Day 

We enjoyed learning about Buddhist traditions during our Bodhi learning day. We tried some meditation, as Buddhists believe that Prince Siddhartha did under the Bodhi tree to reach enlightenment. We learnt that an endless knot is a sign of wisdom in Buddhism and played the knot game, trying to untangle ourselves, to help us to remember this.  

Christingle

To start our Christmas celebrations, we learnt about and made Christingles. For Christians, the orange represents the world, the red ribbon represents the blood of Christ and the lit candle represents Jesus being the light of the world. The four sticks represent the four seasons while the sweets on the sticks represent the fruits of the Earth. We had lots of fun making our Christingles and learning about this Christian tradition.

Our Dinosaur Egg

Whilst walking through Shephalbury Park, looking at the signs of Autumn, we stumbled across a mysterious egg. It looked rather lonely, so we brought it back to school and made it a nest in one of the tyres in our Year 1 garden. There was great excitement when it began to hatch. During our child-initiated learning time, we wrote notes for the egg, in case it hatched when we weren't there. We were very excited to find that, on the return from our Children in Need Ramble, the egg had hatched! We have been writing a recount about finding the egg in our English lessons, using time conjunctions such as first, next and finally to structure our writing. We're hoping the dinosaur doesn't grow too big! 

House Cross Country

We all enjoyed taking part in the house cross country competition. It was a little muddy, but lots of fun! Well done to Flynn and Tia who were our Year 1 winners. 

Black History Month 

As part of Black History Month, we learnt about Sir Lenny Henry and his charitable work with Comic Relief. We all made a red nose, each with a different design. We also learnt how food is brought to us from all around the world and thought about some of the things which we eat for breakfast, learning where they come from. We learnt about the lives of people who grow our food, both today and in the past. 

Macmillan Cake Sale  

We enjoyed some delicious cakes as part of the Macmillan cake sale. Thank you to everyone who baked or brought in cakes and donated. 

Cinderella

After attending the Prince's Ball, we have been learning about the story of Cinderella. We have read the story and acted it out in groups and told the story through puppets in our puppet theatre. We've created story maps and story mountains for the story and are now innovating on these to create our own stories. 

The Prince's Ball

We were just settling down to start our English lesson when we received an invitation to the Prince's Ball. We hadn't brought our party clothes to school, so made ourselves crowns to wear. We all wrote out our invitations to be sure we would be let in and then worked our magic on a pumpkin to take us there! We had lots of fun dancing and some of us even got to dance with the Prince! We had to leave quickly as the clock struck midnight! 

R.E. - The Natural World

Our afternoon lessons this week have focused on R.E. where we have been learning about how different religions give thanks for the natural world. First we went on a walk around the school grounds to identify natural things using our senses. Later we explored creation stories and learnt about the Jewish festival of Sukkot, building our own Sukkah in our garden. 

Our School Library

We thoroughly enjoyed visiting our school library and looking at all of the lovely new books. We each chose a book to take home and share with our families. We will be visiting the library on Wednesday afternoons, so please remember to bring your book to school so you can change it. Which book will you choose next? 

Katie Morag Delivers the Mail

To start our English unit on journey stories, we role played travelling to the Isle of Struay on the ferry from the mainland. When we arrived, we explored the island, meeting the characters in the story. We met Mr MacMaster and helped him to paint the walls, enjoyed painting with the Lady Artist and helped Mr and Mrs McColl in the Post Office. Katie Morag enjoyed paddling in the pool - and so did we! We helped Grannie Island to fix the tractor and went fishing with the Holiday People. After reading the story, 'Katie Morag Delivers the Mail', we acted it out and used puppets to retell the story. We're now beginning to write our own stories based on Katie Morag's adventures. 

P.E. in Year 1

This term we are practising our basic skills. These include running, jumping, throwing and catching. This week we have been practising our jumping skills. It was lots of fun! 

Our First Day in Year 1

What a busy start to the term our first day has been! We started with our first ever whole school assembly in the hall, practised our phonics and our counting and had lots of fun exploring our new classroom. Have a look at our photos to see all the fun we have had on our first day in Year 1!

Welcome to Year 1!

We have lots of fun learning planned for this term! From exploring life in Scotland, celebrating festivals of harvest and light, investigating the seasons and developing our English and maths skills, it’s going to be a busy term!

Our P.E. day this term will be on a Tuesday. Please come to school wearing your P.E. kit.

Remember to bring your water bottle to school, washed and refilled every day. 

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask. We look forward to sharing the next part of your learning journey with you!

Mrs Cargill, Mrs Levy and Miss Gibson