Year 1
Year 1 (ID 1102)
Letters
Year 1 Autumn Term Information - 05.09.24
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12 July 2024
This week we have enjoyed lots of activities to deepen our maths understanding.
Using a range of animals and people we were challenged to put the correct number of legs into the boat.
Making 6- “I can put the parrot, a rooster and a chicken. 2 and 2 and 2 is 6”
“The horse has 4 and the parrot has 2. I can count 6”
Making 8- “4 and 4 is 8 so the giraffe and horse can go in the boat.
“I can do 2 and 2 and 2 and 2 and 2, that is 8”
Making 10- “The pig and the boy is 6 and then a cockerel is 8 and then I need 2 so another cockerel. Let me check it is 10”
We enjoyed practising our doubles by throwing the bean bag onto a number and doubling it. Mrs Riches challenged us to double the numbers all the way up to double 10!
28 June 2024
This week we have enjoyed sharing Handa’s Surprise by Eileen Browne.
The story is set in Kenya which is in Africa. We found out about some of the animals that live in Kenya and which fruits are grown there. We brought some of the fruits from the story into school to taste such as pineapple, mango and passionfruit. First we prepared the fruits by peeling and chopping them.
Then we put them together to make a fruit salad and tasted them, they were delicious!
We observed the fruit closely and produced some observational drawings of the fruit in a basket like Handa’s. Mrs Riches was very impressed!
21 June 2024
We have been on our school trip this week. We visited South Angle Farm. We loved meeting a wide range of animals.
We met some large farm animals including sheep, pigs, alpacas, donkeys and goats. We were able to feed and stroke them.
We then met some smaller animals including a guinea pig, rabbit and tortoises.
South Angle Farm also has reptiles and minibeasts. We met a giant millipeade, a stick insect, tarantula, a corn snake and a bearded dragon named Amber.
We also enjoyed a picnic lunch in the sun and a play.
We also had our sports day which was a lot of fun. We enjoyed taking part in a range of activities. We impressed Mrs Riches by working together as a team and supported each other to complete a range of activities.
14 June 2024
This week has been all about ducks! We have patiently waited for 28 days for our eggs to hatch.
Our first duckling hatched on Monday evening.
It is a quite a large duckling and soon became confident in running around. It is enjoying its food and loves to climb into the food tray to eat and then straight into the water bowl for a drink and splash about! This is Daisy.
The second duckling arrived on Wednesday evening. This duckling took a long time to hatch out and needed a long rest after hatching. Soon it was up and about enjoying snuggling up with its sibling. We named it Jimmy.
We all enjoyed stroking and cuddling the ducklings.
“It is so soft” Emily
“It is cute and fluffy” Avery
“I can see some claws” Ralph
“It nibbled me with its beak” Callum
7 June 2024
This term our topic is ‘Big Wide World’. We will learn about the global community to which we belong and explore how living things, communities and climates differ around the world.
This week we been sharing We’re Going on a Bear Hunt and We’re Going on a Lion Hunt.
We looked at similarities and differences between the two stories including the characters and the setting and produced our own story maps to retell the story of We’re Going on a Lion Hunt.
We went on our own bear hunt in the forest. We went through the long swishy grass, through the deep dark forest, through the thick oozy mud and into the bear cave. We couldn’t believe we actually found a bear!
We were very excited to have the author James Mayhew visit us. He has written and illustrated lots of books including one of our favourites Katie and the Sunflowers. He impressed us with his amazing story telling whilst drawing and painting.
24 May 2024
We took part in National Numeracy Day this week. It is a special dedicated to celebrating numbers and encouraging everyone to improve their numeracy skills.
We came to school dressed up as numbers!
We started the day with a dance linked to numbers following the dancer Katya Jones from Strictly Come Dancing. It was a lot of fun! We then joined in lots of activities including shopping at the Pirate Shop, adding our scores together during a game of beanbag toss, choosing a favourite number and recording that number in many different ways, rolling the dice and picking out a challenge such as jumping and completing the correct number of jumps.
17 May 2024
This week we have been busy in our garden, digging up the weeds and planting sunflower seeds.
To help others learn how to grow seeds we wrote our own information books to explain what to do.
We enjoyed the story of Katie and the Sunflowers as she stepped inside Van Gogh’s famous painting called Sunflowers. We then painted our own sunflowers.
Many of our tadpoles are now froglets, they have now grown their front legs and have been returned to a pond. We were also delighted to see our butterflies emerge from their cocoons. We waited for their wings to dry out and then they were ready to be set free. We released them at forest school. They were reluctant to fly away at first and even rested near us before flying off.
We also have some new additions to our class to look after. We have six duck eggs, which we are hoping will hatch ducklings. The eggs are in an incubator to keep warm where they will stay until their hatching day in a few weeks’ time.
10 May 2024
This week we have been very excited as a few of our tadpoles have grown back legs and one of our caterpillars has changed into a butterfly!
We have been learning about bees. We found out lots of information about bees and how they make honey, we then made our own honey sandwiches to taste the honey, it was delicious!
We have been playing games and using our maths knowledge to total up our scores.
“I know 3 and 2 is 5. I scored 5” Joey.
“It’s double 3 so 6 and then 3 more makes 9” Louie.
We have loved playing at forest school and were very excited to find a letter from the forest fairies asking us to make some magic wands to wave around the forest spreading magic and joy. We have also had a lot of fun hanging around in the trees!
3 May 2024
This week we have been learning about the lifecycle of a butterfly. We have some real caterpillars that we can watch grow and change into butterflies. We are very excited about this! The story of The Very Hungry Caterpillar has helped us understand the life cycle of a butterfly.
We have had a lot of fun creating caterpillars and butterflies. We found out that butterflies have symmetrical wings so tried really hard to make ours symmetrical.
At forest School, we continued our learning about the life cycle of a butterfly and used the natural resources to create symmetrical butterflies. We also practised using a hammer to bang nails into some wood. We then used wool to weave around the nails to create a caterpillar. Some of us added a lead so we could take our caterpillars for a walk!
19 April 2024
This week we have been learning about the life cycle of a frog. We have loved the story of Tadpoles Promise. Tadpole loves his rainbow friend, the caterpillar, and she tells him she loves everything about him. "Promise that you will never change," she says. But can tadpole keep his promise?
To observe the life cycle of a frog first hand we have set up a pond in our classroom and added some tadpoles. We are going to look after the tadpoles and observe how they grow and change into frogs. We are very excited about this!
We found out that the life cycle a frog consists of four stages, we have been learning about these stages and sequencing them.
“A female frog, that’s the Mummy lays some eggs called frogspawn in the pond”. Archie
“Tadpoles come out of the eggs”. Jacob
“The tadpoles change, first they grow back legs and then front legs”. Cass
“The tail will get smaller and go away”. Michael
We explored colour mixing green to paint frogs.
“If you mix yellow and blue it makes green and if you put more blue in you get dark green and if you put more yellow in it makes light green”. Ophelia
At Forest school we were very excited to receive a letter from Dino Dan a palaeontologist. He asked for our help to find out which dinosaurs roamed around our forest area millions of years ago. We explored the forest area and collected fossils and bones. After cleaning the bones, we put them together to work out which dinosaurs roamed around our forest.
Back in the classroom we wrote back to Dino Dan to let him know what we had found.
22 March 2024
This week we have shared the story of Goldilocks and The Three Bears. We have been inspired by the story in our playing and learning. This has included using our maths skills whilst playing with porridge oats, building the Bears house outside using the large loose and retelling the story outside and using the loose parts to make bears.
We wanted to make our own porridge to taste so we cooked it on the fire at Forest School. It was not too hot, not too cold but just right, delicious!
We had a lot of fun with the junk modelling resources creating a bed for Goldilocks to sleep in. We used our cutting, measuring, and joining skills to create our beds.
8 March 2024
This week we started our new topic ‘Once Upon a Time’. We have been reading The Three Little Pigs.
We retold the story of The Three Little Pigs using the small world figures.
We enjoyed the challenge of building our own houses just like the little pigs. We were able to choose our resources from lolly pop sticks, straws and pipe cleaners.
We then tested to see how strong our houses were using a wolf to huff and puff! (Mrs Riches turned her hairdryer into a wolf!).
We were surprised at how sturdy our houses were!
We celebrated World Book Day on Thursday 7th March. It is a celebration of reading, books, authors, illustrators and readers. We dressed up as our favourite characters which included Supertato, Evil Pea, Snow White, the Gingerbread Man and the Very Hungry Caterpillar.
1 March 2024
This week we have been reading The Three Billy Goats Gruff.
We have compared different versions of The Three Billy Goats Gruff and talked about the characters and the setting.
Retelling the story was lots of fun, we focussed on retelling the story in sequence and remembering key repetitive phrases.
“Who’s that trip, trapping across my bridge?”
“It’s me the big, billy goat gruff. I want to eat the delicious, green grass”.
We enjoyed a bridge building challenge, we had to make sure our bridges stretched across the river and it was tall enough for the troll to fit underneath.
Outside we made bridges using the large loose parts. We worked together to construct our bridges to make sure they were strong and safe to trip trap across.
16 February 2024
This week we have been finding out about the Chinese New Year. This festival signals the beginning of spring and is celebrated in January or February. It is a time when families and friends get together to say goodbye to the old and welcome the new.
This year the Chinese New Year started on February 10th. It is the year of the dragon.
We made lanterns to decorate our classroom, we used red and gold as these colours are believed to bring good luck. We also made our own dragon masks and dragon puppets.
We had a lot of fun in our role-play Chinese restaurant and exploring in our tuff tray.
We prepared and cooked a Chinese stir fry with mushrooms, peppers, carrots, noodles, rice, and prawn crackers. We challenged ourselves to eat it using chopsticks, which proved quite tricky!
We found out during the Chinese New Year people participate in lion and dragon dancing. This is to bring good luck into the new year. We made our own lion and dragon’s head and tried out the dancing ourselves accompanied by Chinese music. We had a lot of fun!
We finished our busy week cooking pancakes on the fire at forest school. They were delicious!
9 February 2024
We have been excited to learn about Space this week. We shared some stories by Oliver Jeffers How to Catch a Star and The Way Back home.
After reading How to Catch a Star, we thought of other imaginative ways to catch a star.
“A Kangaroo bounces up and gets the star”. Callum
“A dinosaur has a long arm with a magnet on the end to catch a star”. Henry
“Unicorns will fly up”. Molly
We then enjoyed, The Way Back Home which led us to finding out about space travel. We watched a video of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin the first people to land on the moon and enjoyed watching Tim Peake in space and learning about life in the space station.
We have been busy in the creative area creating moon pictures by painting and printing and challenging ourselves to build our own rockets using junk modelling materials. We learnt how to draw shapes, make cones, and attach different pieces securely.
In maths we have been finding out all about number 6. We found the number 6 represented all around our classroom and used the Numicon and dominoes to find ways to make 6.
We have also been very creative in the small world area.
“We made a bug and dinosaur hotel with a waterfall falling into a pond and trees to climb and even dens to sleep in”.
We embraced all the mud at forest school, we splashed, squelched and rolled in it and made boats using bark twigs and leaves to float in the big puddle.
2 February 2024
This week we have been reading Peace at Last by Jill Murphy. Mr Bear could not get good night’s sleep due to lots of noise. We have been learning about the importance of a good bedtime routine and a good night’s sleep.
We helped Weatherby Bear to get ready for bed. First, he had a cup of warm milk, then he got undressed and into a lovely hot bubbly bath. Next, we washed him with soap and dried him. Then we put his pyjamas and slippers on and combed his fur.
Finally, we brushed his teeth, tucked him into bed and read him a bedtime story.
We have also been finding out how important it is to clean our teeth. We know brushing our teeth gets rid of any food around the teeth and washes away sugars that can hurt our teeth.
8 January 2024
This half term our topic is ‘Winter Wonderland’. This week we have been finding out about thing associated with winter, including animals and clothing. We have reflected on the changes that have happened in the weather and day length since starting school in September.
Through sharing the books Winter Sleep and Robin’s Winter song we have found out that many different animals hibernate in the winter including frogs, dormice and bats. We explored making nests and dens so our toy animals could hibernate for the winter.
We found out that some garden birds fly south for the winter but many birds stay. We were interested to find out which birds stay and whether they visit our garden area.
We found out about blackbirds, blue tits, robins and chaffinches.
Despite the cold weather we have enjoyed playing outside. We were very excited to discover ice!
In maths this week we have been learning about zero and instantly recognising the number of objects in a group without needing to count them. We have enjoyed working together to match amounts quickly using our subitising skills.
At forest school we observed the Grandmother tree and created some beautiful artwork to show how she looks in winter.
8 December 2023
We have started learning about the celebration of Christmas. We have read a variety of stories to find out about the First Christmas. We found out about the birth of Jesus and why Christians celebrate Christmas. We have been rehearsing our own version of the nativity story and were excited to perform this to our families and friends. We retold the story through singing, dancing and acting. It was brilliant! Everyone was very proud of us.
We have put up a Christmas tree in our classroom and added baubles, lights and tinsel, it looks beautiful. We also decorated our home corner and cooked a delicious Christmas dinner!
We have been retelling familiar stories and making up our own using the small world resources.
The reception class post office has been very busy. We have been writing letters to Santa, making envelopes to put them in, adding a stamp and posting them.
At forest school we made Santa sticks and used the saw to cut slices of wood to turn into tree decorations.
24 November 2023
We have loved the story of Owl Babies by Martin Waddell and Patrick Benson. We focussed on retelling the story using sequencing cards and the small world resources. We talked about the characters thoughts and feelings during key events in the story.
We wrote about the story using our phonic knowledge to record with.
We have been busy creating and making owls this week by painting, collaging, cutting, sticking and using loose parts.
In maths this week we have been finding out about number 4.
“I know there are 4 because I can see 3 and 1”. Molly
“I can see 2 and 2. I can see 4 altogether”. Emily
At forest school we made owl masks and retold the story of Owl Babies. We wondered whether any owls are nesting in our owl boxes. We also made some bird feeders by melting lard on the fire and mixing in some bird seed. We then put them in yoghurt pots to set. We will hang them in the forest next week which will help to keep the birds fed during the autumn and winter.
10 November 2023
This week we found out about Remembrance Day which is a special day in November that gives people the chance to remember those who fought and lost their lives during the war and to honour their memory. We had a 2-minute silence at 11 O’clock in the forest to remember the soldiers.
I’ll wear a little poppy,
As red as red can be,
To show that I remember,
Those who fought for me.
We also learnt all about Diwali. Diwali is a festival celebrated by Hindus in India and all around the world. This year Diwali starts on 12th November. It is also known as the festival of lights. We have made our own Diva lamps, painted Rangoli patterns, enjoyed listening to and retelling the Diwali story of Rama and Sita and creating patterns to decorate our hands with.
3 November 2023
Pumpkins have been a focus this week. We explored the pumpkins by cutting them open and scooping them out. The pumpkins were ‘smelly’, ‘orange’, ‘hard’, ‘wet’, ‘soggy’, ‘slimy’ and ‘stinky’.
We used our colour mixing skills to paint pumpkins.
Mrs ‘Witches’ helped us to create our own spells. We put lots of ingredients into the cauldron such as a frog, ghost, pumpkin, and a bat. Then we wrote down our spells using our phonic knowledge.
We also made pumpkin soup. We cut the pumpkin up, peeled and chopped potatoes, carrots and onions. Then we put all the ingredients into a big pan and boiled them until they were soft.
We then warmed up the soup on the fire at Forest School, it was delicious!
We have also been learning about Guy Fawkes and why bonfire night is celebrated on November 5th. We talked about our experiences watching a firework display and created our own firework pictures using chalk, pastels, paint, glitter and loose parts.
20 October 2023
This week we have started thinking about autumn. We have been reading Leaf Man. It follows the journey of leaf man as he is blown across the land. A Leaf Man's got to go where the wind blows.
We went on an autumn walk to collect autumn leaves. We found leaves that were yellow, red, brown, orange and green.
We used these leaves to create our own leaf men.
We also printed with the leaves to create some beautiful autumnal pictures and painted our own autumn trees.
Forest School was very wet this week, but we had lots of fun jumping and splashing in the puddles.
6 October 2023
We have been learning all about apples this week. We found out that apples grow on trees and the seeds can be planted to grow new trees. We saved some apple seeds from our snack apples and planted them. We look forward to watching them grow.
We talked about things we can make with apples and then made an apple and blackberry crumble. We prepared the apples by peeling off the skin and chopping them up. We then put the apples and blackberries in a dish, added the crumble and cooked it. Then we ate it, It was delicious!
We also enjoyed printing with apples and colour mixing green to paint apples.
At forest school we painted with blackberries it was a lot of fun.
29 September 2023
This week we have been learning about how we change as we grow older. We have talked about what babies need help with what we can do now we are 4 and 5 and what job we would like to do when we are grownups. Reading When We Grow Up has given us lots of ideas.
In maths we have been sorting objects by size, shape and colour. We have sorted objects and explained our sorting rule.
“I have made a set of things with spots”.
“I have made a set of cutlery”.
We were very excited to go to Forest School for the first time. We met the Grandmother Tree, learnt about keeping ourselves safe in the forest and the important rule of ‘No pick, no lick, be careful with a stick’. We explored the forest area and can’t wait for next week!
22 September 2023
This week we have been thinking about our families. We have shared the books The Great Big Book of Families and Families, Families, Families. We found out that there are many kinds of families, but they are all special to us.
This is our class ‘Our School Family’.
We have been exploring many resources in our classroom and outside in our garden area to help develop our fine motor skills, which will help us with skills such as writing, manipulating objects, using scissors and getting dressed.
8 September 2023
We have had a lot of fun in our first week at school. We have made new friends, learnt lots of new routines such as sitting on the carpet for registration, tidying up and lining up for lunch.
We have talked about making friends, being kind to one another, sharing and taking turns.
Many activities have been enjoyed both inside the classroom and outside in our garden with our friends.
