Happy half term Year 1!

How have we already finished half of a term, the weeks are flying by! What a fantastic term being immersed into our zoo topic.
In English this week, we carried on looking at performance poetry. We focused on the poem 'zoo dream' where the children told a poem about dreaming of going to a zoo where they saw animals doing lots of crazy stuff. The children had to carry on the poem thinking of what other animals we had at a zoo and what crazy stuff they could do. We had kangaroos cooking, cheetahs chatting, tigers ticking and parrots praying. Our video from last week's poetry is now on you tube. You can check it out by visiting this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfvsxgmQS8s In SPaG we learnt about adding -ing to a root word where the spelling is not changed. We learnt that all of these words are verbs. As someone in our class told us this is a 'doing word' because it is something that we do. We had to change lots of words e.g. play, kick and camp by adding the -ing. You then wrote some interesting sentences using these words.
In maths we finished our addition within 20, you were all able to solve word problems independently and within your groups. You were able to think about how we may use adding in real-life situations e.g. when we go to the shops and we want to know much we are spending. We then moved onto our topic of subtraction within 20. It was great to see how you were using the process I taught you last term to help you with your bigger number sums. You are all very good at independently using practical resources to help you solve the sums. You were also using the idea of subtracting to 10 to help you solve sums with greater numbers e.g. 16-11. Although we found this tricky you could understand how these small steps help you to work it out more mentally than practically.
In Geography this week with Mrs Swan you learnt about different animal habitats and how animals adapt themselves when living in cold and hot climates. You then independently matched different animals to the different countries they live in. You then were able to label if this was a hot or cold country.
In music you are continuing to learn and perform the betty bear goes to the zoo songs. You are really enjoying these workshops and love to sing about our topic. It is also very interesting to see how much information you are learning from the lyrics in each song.
In art this week we have been focusing on our artist of the term Kandinsky. You are all very confident to say that his pieces of art were abstract because they are made up of shapes and different lines. We looked at his art and shared our opinions of what we think he was trying to paint and what we like about it. You then in your groups got a piece of his art and you were able to write different questions that you wanted to ask Kandinsky about his artwork. Some of your questions were: Why did you use different shapes? When did you make this painting? Where did you paint your work? What good questioning skills you are gaining year 1! We then read the book 'Elmer' and created our own using Kandinsky's squares with concentric circles as our focal point. You used oil pastels to create your design and then you are going to wash over them with watercolour and put them into your study work books to share. These are amazing and I know how proud you are of your art work.

As it was safer internet day on Tuesday we did some work around E-safety! You all shared your ideas of E-safety e.g 'it's when you make sure you only go on an iPad when an adult is near you so they can make sure you're going on the right stuff.' Or 'it's when you only go on the apps your mummy tells you to go on' we then watched and listened to a story about several monsters in a monster school. They were having an online drawing competition that was posted online but unfortunately someone had written an unkind comments. We spoke about some people become more confident when people don't always know who they are. We also spoke about how unkind comments online would make you feel and who you would report it too. You then all created your own pictures for competition and we all said positive comments about each person's work.

Thank you to all families for joining me at parents evening to discuss your child's achievements and progress. It was so lovely to see you all again. Thank you to all parents for filling in the feedback forms.

I hope you all have the most amazing half term break. I am looking forward to hearing all about it. Remember to rest up as it's very tiring to be superstars!

See you all after half term,

Miss Haynes