Welcome back Y1

Welcome back year 1! This week, it was time to say goodbye to virtual teaching and a hello to all of your lovely faces as we came back together as a class. There has been a rush of excitement and nervous butterflies in our class but you have settled back in perfectly. You wouldn't even think that some of you have been away from the classroom for two months. We spent a lot of this week spending time with our friends, understanding how to play and share with our friends again and settling back into the Y1 rhythms and routines. However, lots of learning and still taken place and you have worked incredibly hard.

In English, you focused the first two days on your lockdown memories. Although a lockdown can be difficult, we all looked at the positive sides of spending time with our families and learning new skills like baking. You created your own lockdown jar filled with memories which will be put inside of your study workbook. Some of your best memories were having extra cuddles with your mummy, spending time with your daddy more and being able to go on long walks with your dogs. We focused a lot of this time on how we felt during lockdown, how we felt about coming back to school and how we feel now that we are in school. On Wednesday, we started our new talk for writing topic which is on finding tales. You started off with a cold 'have a go' write where you wrote about Christmas morning and what you find when you wake up. On Thursday, we had a big shock when we walked into the classroom as there were footprints everywhere and pictures of a tiger that had been in our classroom! The footprints led us to the playhouse where we saw a tiger having tea. This immersed us into our focus story of 'The tiger who came for tea'. We have really enjoyed learning the first part of this story and using actions to retell the story. Your SPaG focus of this week during our lessons was to use the conjunction 'and' to join two things together in a sentence. We described what different animals looked like and your sentences were super. 'This animal has floppy ears and wrinkly skin,' can you guess what animal it is?

I was incredibly proud of you this week when I assessed you in your phonics and I could see how hard you have worked at home with your phonics. You were all super excited to receive your new reading books and couldn't wait to read them. We have been working hard on learning new sounds and reading new works this week as a whole class but next week you will go off into your smaller groups.

During maths this week, we started off by recapping some of the subtraction work that we found difficult during lockdown. We looked at how we can break sums down to find the answer quicker. You did really well at this and were much more confident at having a go at the subtraction sums. We then moved onto our numbers to 50 and built upon all of the counting work we have done previously to help us count to 50. You were careful with writing your numbers and recognising them too, this will help us to understand how much each number is worth next week when we look at the tens and ones. We also had lots of time in the garden hunting for numbers and counting out objects.

Our afternoons have been filled with lots of art as we absorbed ourselves into our new topic which I can finally say is 'animals in the zoo'. We created animals from our class book of 'class two at the zoo' by rolling, coiling and scrunching up paper to create a 3D effect. We then carried out some learning on our new artist 'Henri Rousseau' who drew and painted jungles. You created a fact file on him and then we used his style and skills to finish our big art piece. You understood that Henri would paint lots of leaves in the background of his paintings which would hide some of the animals. You used this idea by drawing out leaves with oil pastels and then creating a wax resist by painting them with brusho. I was very impressed with all of the skills you had learnt this week in art and your final piece which hangs proudly on our display.

In History, you learnt all about the census and how this is carried out every 10 years. We talked about why we have a census and what they use the results for. We created our very own census on our favourite books. You had to vote for your favourite book and then we completed a tally chart and a pictogram to show our results.

In PHSE, you started your new heart-smart topic on 'fake is a mistake' where you learnt how important it was to love and believe in yourself.

In your wellbeing Friday, we built upon our learning of the story of the 'dot' to create some more dots using oil pastels. You listened carefully to the story and remembered that everyone is an artist. I can't wait to see all of your fantastic dots on our whole school display. I hope it will leave you feeling proud of yourselves.

What a brilliant and memorable week back in year 1!

Have a lovely and restful weekend,

Miss Haynes