Year 1

Spring Term - Literacy

Another wonderful term exploring some really high quality texts in our Year 1 Literacy curriculum. After Christmas, we began looking at 'One Day on Our Blue Planet - In the Savannah' by Ella Bailey. This text was absolutely fascinating as we began to explore what life is like in a very different part of the world to what we know, and some of the animals that we would expect to find. The language and illustrations helped us produce some really effective poems as well as some informative non-chronological reports about African elephants. We have just begun reading and enjoying 'The Adventures of Egg Box Dragon' by Richard Adams, exploring instructional writing and making our very own dragons! 

Spring Term - Maths

We started this term looking at the value of each digit in numbers to 20 and then beyond! We enjoyed making 2-digit numbers using Numicon and Base 10 to understand the value of each digit. Then we used our knowledge of place value to compare amounts and numbers. 

We also learnt how to use positional and directional language. We had lots of fun giving each other directions to follow using the new language that we had learnt. We learnt 'left and right', 'quarter, half and full turn', and 'clockwise and anti-clockwise'. We even followed some line dancing instructions and thought of our own routines using our new directional language! 

We have focused on addition and subtraction this half-term. We have been working so hard to learn our number bonds of 10 and started to learn the bonds of 20. We have been using these number facts to help us with some new addition and subtraction strategies.   

As always, we have also been combining our knowledge and resilience to try some tricky problem solving!

Spring Term - Science

Our Science this term fitted in wonderfully with our Literacy as we began learning all about animals, including humans. We learned about what an animal actually is and how they are different to plants. It was also really interesting to learn that there are so many different types of animal - mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and fish. After naming similarities and differences between them all, we began learning about carnivores, herbivores and omnivores which really helped us when we we looking at African animals in the Savannah. 

Spring Term - Other Curriculum Areas

We have certainly been kept busy this term with some of our other curriculum areas. In history we spent a couple of weeks learning about the lives of 2 very significant individuals - Mary Anning and David Attenborough. Both of these individuals had or have a love of the natural world and really contributed to our understanding of the world around us. We found Mary particularly fascinating and interesting and loved looking at her fossil discoveries. 

Our DT project this term was to explore textiles. We learnt about different ways of joining fabrics before planning and making a textile finger puppet. We thought carefully about our choice of materials and followed our plans as best as we could to ensure our outcome matched our design. 

We were also delighted to welcome Lottie from the Guernsey Sports Commission into school to deliver 2 fantastic gymnastics lessons really focusing on developing those fundamental movement skills which are required for building the strength and movement needed in gym. We are continuing to work on this as the term progresses. 

Autumn Term - Literacy

This term we have absolutely loved our class text 'Out and About: A First Book of Poems' by Shirley Hughes. We have enjoyed so many poems from this book, looking at all the different seasons but with a particular focus on autumn. The poem 'wind' was one of our favourites - we considered what we like or dislike about the wind, enjoyed dancing to some music related to the wind and enjoyed lots of the lovely language within this poem. We wrote our own poems using the theme of autumn and really thought carefully about our senses when composing our poems. 

Autumn Term - Maths

We started this term by focussing on numbers to 20. We worked hard on our careful counting and looked at how we could represent groups of objects in different ways. We drew pictures and used different resources (such as Numicon, counters and cubes) to show amounts of objects. Next, we practised our number formation. We learnt some funny rhymes to help us remember the correct formations and tried hard to keep our numbers neat! We enjoyed playing different games to practise counting forwards and backwards and to find one more/one less than a number to 20. We even started to compare numbers using the greater than/less than signs! 

During our first half-term, we have also explored 2D and 3D shapes. We have been working hard to recognise, name and begin to describe the shapes. We finished our first half-term with a week of financial literacy. We thought about what money is, why we need it and how it can be earned. We concentrated on recognising and understanding the value of different coins. 

Finally, we have also been using our maths skills to do some super problem solving!

Autumn Term - Science

We have been lucky enough to enjoy two units of science this term - seasons and plants. During our learning all about the 4 different seasons, we considered our own birthday and thought about what the weather is usually like and what season it is in. We learned about the changes to trees and the leaves and thought carefully about the weather. We enjoyed being scientists, observing the weather on a daily basis. Plants was a really fun topic - we learned about the main parts of a plant and the difference between wild plants and garden plants. We loved spending time in our own school garden, identifying some of the plants in there. 

Autumn Term - Other

We had a fantastic time during our outdoor learning afternoons in Year 1! We were resilient and worked together to build twig towers, bug homes and complete scavenger hunts. We have been developing our dance skills in our indoor PE sessions and have been practising some of the fundamental movement skills during our outdoor PE lessons. We explored colour mixing during our art lessons and made some fabulous moving pictures during D&T.