Year 1

Autumn Term - Literacy

This half-term we have absolutely loved our class text 'Whatever Next!' by Jill Murphy.  First, we looked at the front cover and made predictions. Next, we thought about how to ask and write questions. We wrote questions to Baby Bear, the main character in the story. Baby Bear visits the moon, so we enjoyed using our phonic knowledge to write lists of things we would take to the moon! Finally, we sequenced the story and had a go at retelling it. 

In Year 1, we have been working so hard on our letter formation and writing a sentence. We are trying to remember our finger spaces, capital letters and full stops. 

Autumn Term - Maths

We started this term by learning more about 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!  

We had lots of fun exploring 2D and 3D shapes! We played lots of games to help us recognise, name and begin to describe the shapes.

Autumn Term - Science

We have found our science unit on plants very interesting! We have learnt 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, and going on a wild plant hunt around the school outside area. We have also enjoyed learning about the parts of a tree and different types of trees. We have learnt about evergreen and deciduous trees. We were excited to see the leaves start to fall from all of the deciduous trees when autumn arrived!  

Autumn Term - Other

We have been developing our dance and yoga skills during our indoor PE sessions and have been practising some of the fundamental movement skills during our outdoor PE lessons.  We enjoyed our trip to Cobo Beach and had fun jumping the waves as it was quite a blustery day! 

In geography, we thought about the four seasons of the year and the months that are in each season. We focused on autumn. We went outside and collected leaves from the trees. We enjoyed making some colourful leaf rubbings! We also looked at our daily weather chart for the first time. We began talking about the weather each day and taking turns to change our weather chart.

We have been exploring line and colour in art. We looked at Bridget Riley's art and used this as inspiration to experiment with different types of line. We used chalk to experiment with creating different types of line and used this to create a whole class piece of artwork. Next, we moved onto looking at colour in art. We learnt about primary colours. We experimented with mixing primary colours to make other colours. We had such fun using both playdough and paint to experiment with colour mixing!

During our DT unit on mechanisms, we looked at how sliders can be used to make things move up, down, left and right. Our next challenge was to design a moving picture based on the story 'Whatever Next!'. After planning our designs, we used our knowledge of sliders to make moving pictures. We loved making our pictures move and started to independently add sliders to some of our other drawings and paintings. 

We had a fantastic time during our outdoor learning afternoons in Year 1! We were really creative and made our own tree people using natural materials. When the heavy rain stopped us from going outside for one of our sessions, we loved collaborating with members of our class to make dens in the classroom instead!