Year 1 weekly newsletter

The weeks are flying by in Y1 but we are making the most out of every moment. You are making me proud of everything you achieve in just a week. Although we are getting tired as the end of half term is near, you just wouldn't be able to tell in the quality of work that you do.

You have finished all of your traditional tale stories now and what a delight it was to read through them. It is incredible to think you started the term with just being able to write sentences and now you have wrote a whole story. The twists you have put on the story of 'the three little pigs' are better than the traditional version. The excitement and proudness was definitely felt by everyone as you read your finished story to me. For the rest of the week in English, we have had a handwriting focus and we have been learning how to sit our letters on the line for when we are writing. You have focused on the letters a,e,o,c,u,r,s,z,v,n,m, x this week which are all of our 'grass' letters that sit on the line. We have been writing these letters in flour, with chalk and in our new handwriting books. You have been chanting the rhymes whilst you form each letter. Next week we will be focusing on our 'sky' letters which are our tall letters that are formed all the way to the top line.

In our daily phonics sessions, we have learned even more sounds this week. You are becoming more confident in using 'Fred in your head' to read your green words. I have also been very proud of how many red words you are starting to read now as well. With our phonics sessions, we also do 20 minutes of reading every day. The reading sessions are my favourite as I get to come around and listen to all of your beautiful reading. The progress that you are making in reading is absolutely amazing and you make Mrs VR and I so proud.

Part-part whole models have taken over our maths lessons this week as you started your new topic. We learned that two parts make a whole and these parts can be equal or unequal. I was very impressed with how much you already remembered from reception which helped us to build upon this knowledge. You practically created part-part-whole models with conkers and counters. On Friday we looked at how we can create fact families using the numbers from our part-part-whole model. We looked at the different ways you can write a number sentence using the same three numbers. Although we found this difficult, you showed great resilience.

We had a very important task to do in science this week. First, we had a flower that was folded up and we had to put it into a tray of water. You all watched the flower very closely and soon realised that the flower was starting to open up petal by petal. We discussed why we thought this happened. You had some great ideas from 'it is alive' to 'the water is making it open up'. We then realised that the paper was soaking up the water which was forcing the petals to open. We then had a letter sent to us from the driver of the hundred decker bus and he wanted us to test out different materials to see which material was the most absorbent. He was then going to use this material to make beach towels out of for decker 30 (the swimming pool decker). First, we needed to know what the word 'absorbent' meant. We then soon realised that the paper in our starter experiment was absorbing the water which was pushing the petals open. You then chose some more materials to test their absorbency to see if they could be used for beach towels. We found out that the newspaper, cotton wool and fabric were absorbent because they soaked up the water and if we were to squeeze the material the water would come out.

In computing, you carried on making your transport posters on pic collage. You took a picture of two of your favourite types of transport on the iPad's camera. You then uploaded these pictures on to pic collage and changed the size of your photos. You then added text and a background colour. These posters look amazing and we are going to display them on our topic board.

In art, we carried on with our topic of canal art. We looked at how people paint castles onto narrow boats to make them pretty. We sketched our own castle out and used the technique of shading to show darkness and light on the drawing.

In RE, you learned more about the creation story through drama and music. We thought about how much time and thought God put in to create a beautiful world for us. We realised that some people don't respect the world and treat it badly. From this, we wrote some sentences on how we could protect God's world and make it a better place again. I was so impressed with your ideas and sentences.

I had the treat of teaching you PE this week and you were all fantastic. We had to do it inside due to the bad weather but what is more exciting than pushing all the tables back and doing it in the classroom. We did our warm-up game of 'traffic lights' and some stretching. Then we set off to do 30 minutes of yoga which you were great at.

On Tuesday afternoon we switched our brains off, sat back and relaxed whilst listening to calming music. We carefully concentrated on our breathing as we completed some mindfulness colouring.

On Friday afternoon, you had the lucky treat of having Mrs Swan again. You performed your 'Hey you' song in music and learned more about the physical and human features in Geography.

I just want to say how proud I am of you all. Even though you are starting to get tired with this being such a long term you are not letting that get in the way of producing beautiful and amazing work. You are all superstars!

Have a lovely weekend. Take some time to rest and I will see you on Monday.

Miss Haynes