Year 1     Learning Update

Central idea: Learning about history can help us understand the present. 

This week we have been exploring line of inquiry 3 by considering how objects have changed over time. 

We thought about the features of houses in our local area and what the key features of a 1940s house would have been. We created plans for our homes, carefully considering the materials we will need to use to ensure our houses are sturdy. We then used our plans to work in pairs, creating model homes from the 1940s using various junk modelling materials. 

"My house has bow windows and is made from bricks."

"My house is semi detached. It has a chimney and a black door." 

"The base of my house can be this box because it is thick and strong."

"The roof needs some thin cardboard so I can fold it, look let's do this together, we can fold the roof." 

On Wednesday we engaged in various immersive activities, considering what school life would have looked like in the 1940s. Here are some of the examples of what we did: We played popular playground games such as hopscotch, skipping and noughts and crosses. We moved our classroom around, sat in rows and dipped our 'pens' in 'ink' to write some sentences. We reflected on our experiences and thought about how school and life in the 1940s is different to now. 

"Lots of food was rationed."

"The games are a bit similar because we still do skipping now."

"We use pens that have ink in them. We don't have to put the pen in ink."

In maths we have been measuring and comparing capacity. We thought about how many cups of water it took to fill different sized containers. We used this knowledge to compare our findings, thinking about which containers could hold a greater/smaller amount. 

"The small container holds 1 cup of water. The big container holds 4 cups of water. The big container has a greater capacity than the small one."