Welcome to Year 1

Our teacher is Miss Adams.

Our teaching assistant is Miss Audsley.

Mrs Stephenson also teaches in our classroom.

Please make sure that your child brings both their indoor and outdoor PE kits into school every Monday and we will send them home at the end of the week.

Indoor PE kit is a white t-shirt, black shorts and black pumps. Outdoor PE kit is a tracksuit (jogging bottoms and a hoodie), a t-shirt and trainers.

Reading

Reading is such an important skill. We read regularly with the children in school, but it is important that they have as many opportunities to read as possible and practise all the skills they learn in phonics lessons. Reading at home with your child, even for just a few minutes a day, can make a huge difference to their reading ability, the range of their vocabulary, and their love and enjoyment of reading. Reading a bedtime story to them is also a great way to encourage their love of stories and fuel their imagination.

Phonics

What is the phonics screening check?

The national phonics screening check is an assessment that was introduced in 2012 to all year 1 pupils and is a quick and easy check of your child’s phonics knowledge. It takes place each year during June.

What is involved in the phonics screening check?

Your child will sit down with me and read a list of 40 words. Some of the words will be real words and some will be nonsense words. They will be asked to ‘sound out’ a word and blend sounds together. The check is very similar to tasks the children already complete during phonics lessons and they will have lots of practise throughout the year. It usually takes around 10 minutes to complete and they have some juice and a biscuit at the end as a reward for their hard work.

Some useful resources to look at:

http://www.phonicsplay.co.uk

http://www.letters-and-sounds.com/

Our Classroom

We are proud of our classroom environment and take good care of it! In Year 1, we have access to 'choosing time' which is where the children can choose an area of the classroom to work in to continue their learning independently. We have beautiful displays, which show the fantastic work that our children have produced. Our classroom is colourful and exciting! Here we are taking full advantage of every learning opportunity!

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What was Year 1 like last year?

We have a real love for learning in Year 1. Here are some examples of what we got up to last year.

Growing plants

We are learned all about plants in science. We designed an experiment to see what would happen to a bean in different conditions. We gave one bean water but no sunlight, another bean sunlight but no water, and we gave another bean both water and sunlight, to see what would happen. We checked our beans regularly to see if we could see any changes. We also planted our own beans and took care of them and watched them grow. We wondered if our beanstalks would grow big enough for us to climb them...

Easter

In RE, we had been learning about the Easter story and how we celebrate that Jesus came back to life after dying on the cross. We talked about how eggs and chicks are a sign of new life, and so for the Easter assembly we worked very hard to make some Easter chick artwork. We use lollipop sticks to make the body, then drew around our hands to make the wings. We even scrunched up yellow tissue paper to give our chicks a fluffy body. Finally, we added the head and legs. We think they look great! We also enjoyed having a dance at the Easter disco. Here are some pictures of us showing off our best dance moves!

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World Book Day

In Year 1, we love reading and listening to stories so we were very excited to celebrate World Book Day! We dressed up as characters from our favourite books, talked about the kinds of books we liked and listened to stories together. We made bookmarks, took part in a book quiz in teams and worked together with our friends to try and find different things within the books in our classroom during a book scavenger hunt. We had lots of fun!

Trip to Fairfield House

In order to understand what life was like for children in the past, Year 1 became time travellers and took a trip back to 1883 - the Victorian era. We went to a Victorian school and found that boys and girls were treated very differently. We had some lessons with a very strict Victorian teacher and then we got to see what it was like to do housework before things like washing machines and hoovers had been invented (it was VERY hard work!). We also got to play with lots of different Victorian toys and thought about how they were different to our own toys at home.

Children in Need

On 16th November, our school held a non-uniform day to raise money for Children in Need. We wore spotty clothes and did lots of fun activities throughout the day. We really enjoyed making (and eating!) spotty buns. We also made lots of Pudsey Bear artwork, including some fabulous collages.

Road Safety Day

In Year One, we read a story about Super Cat, a road safety superhero. We talked about how we can keep ourselves safe near roads, and learned Super Cat's road safety rap to help us remember how to cross roads safely. Have a look at our video below to see us performing the rap.

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Literacy

In our Literacy lessons we have been looking at a story called 'Man on the moon.' by Simon Bartram.

We have looked at the character Bob and made predictions about who he is before revealing the story. We have acted out part of the story and pretended to visit the moon on our very own rocket. We sent postcards to our friends that we bought from Bob; the man on the moon. We had lots of fun and produced some fantastic pieces of writing!

See if you can spot Bob entertaining the tourists as they approach the moon in their rockets.

Autumn & Harvest Work

We went on an Autumn hunt to discover colours, textures and objects found in Autumn. We used the items we collected to help us with some descriptive writing all about Autumn.

We have been thinking about Harvest. We have started to create our own leaf shaped sun catchers to display on our windows, using tissue paper. We have also been thinking about what we are thankful for.