A growling start to the spring term in Y1!

Happy new year everyone and welcome back to school! It was so lovely to see you all on Tuesday and hear about all of your Christmas adventures with your families. I hope you all managed to have some time to relax but have lots of festive fun too.
As always a new term brings a new topic and this term it is 'The zoo and their animals'. As we walked into our classroom on Tuesday morning our whole classroom had been transformed. We had a jungle themed reading area with snakes all over the camouflaged netting, tiger stripes over our display area and then a jungle tree. It was amazing to see all of the expressions on your faces as you filled with excitement. On Tuesday afternoon, we were left an animal carrier and a book in the middle of the classroom. Miss Haynes was too scared to open the animal carrier as someone kindly read out that it had 'may bite' and 'be careful animals inside' written on the carrier. As one of you bravely opened the carrier we found that a zoo keeper had left us some colourless animals and we soon found out that these were our characters from our new class book 'class two at the zoo' and they needed our help to bring them back to life by giving them their colours back. This soon turned into our big art and every afternoon we have been focusing on creating our animals including mod rocking our anaconda which will then be painted next week. Can you tell your families any facts that we have learnt about anacondas?
In phonics this week, you have all been sent to your new groups. I cannot believe the amazing progress you are all making. I hear from all of the teachers that teach you in your small groups about how well behaved and polite you are and how you always try your best. You all have a 30 minute session of phonics everyday which consists of 20 minutes of reading time. This has really helped with your fluency, accuracy and comprehension skills in reading. Well done superstars!
In English this week, you have been introduced to your new English topic of 'traditional tales'. We started by expressing what we know about traditional tales and seeing if we can remember any that we have read before. We then independently did our 'cold write' on any traditional tales or stories the children wanted to write about. It was great to see how you are all applying your phonics skills to your spelling of words and remembering everything that I taught you last term. We have been reading different traditional tales over the week and discussing the different characters, settings, openings and endings. Next week we will start to learn, recite and story map one of our favourite traditional tales. In SPaG, we concentrated on where we put our full stops. I showed you how if you do lots of writing and don't put any full stops in till the end then this can make us really breathless when reading it. We took a paragraph of writing and decided where each sentence started and ended and then we placed our full stops at each end so that we knew where we could take a breath.
In maths, we finished our topic of shapes by looking at repeating patterns. We described a pattern, explained what the 2D or 3D shapes were in the pattern and reasoned to describe the missing shapes in the pattern. You all had lots of fun by creating your own different patterns. We then moved to our topic of numbers and place value to 20. We have been practicing our counting, ordering and knowing one more and one less than any given number to 20. Yesterday it got a little trickier as we focused on the place value of numbers to 20. We had to understand how many tenths and ones were in a number. We found this tricky but you showed great resilience as you used many of the maths resources to help you with your understanding. We will do some more work on this next week.
I have assigned the children their maths homework on the app 'school jam' all instructions and login details were sent home on Friday. Well done to those children that have already completed this. It was exciting to see all of your amazing number work that you have done at home!
Have a lovely weekend,
Miss Haynes.