Welcome to Y1!

What a fun-filled and exciting first week we have had year 1! As soon as you walked through our year 1 gate on Monday morning you had a big smile on your face and that smile has not left us. I am so proud of how well you have all settled into our year 1 life and our different routines in school. It has been lovely to watch you reunite with your friends and share your exciting summer news with each other. You've done that well, I would not have thought we haven't had proper schooling since March.

On Monday we had some riddles left around the classroom which took us to our topic books. From our topic books, we soon realised that our 'journeys and discoveries' topic was TRANSPORT. What a delight it was to see your excitement and engagement as we started to learn about our topic. We have learned that transport is something that takes us from one place to another which then helped us to group different types of transport together depending on if they were land, water or air transport. We then found out that we were going to create some 'transport' big art and it was going to be hot air balloons as these have a really special job in our book. Before we could start our big art, we needed to know some facts about hot air balloons. We found out that the Montgolfier brothers invented the first hot air balloon and they sent a duck, sheep and a rooster in the balloon first to see if it was safe. We now know how hot air balloons rise, move in the sky and then come back down to the ground. I am so impressed at how much you already know about hot air balloons that I knew we were ready to create our big art. We designed our hot air balloon first and then we started to use paper mache to make our balloon with a partner. It got very very messy but your teamwork was fantastic! I can't wait for you to paint your hot air balloons next week and then we will display them in our classroom from the ceiling.

As well as big art and topic work, we have been completing some independent writing in English. You have been carefully using your phonics knowledge to help spell different words. You were then challenged further to write sentences. You told me that a super sentence has to have capital letters, full stops and finger spaces. It was so lovely to see many of you using these features in your independent writing already. I am still beaming with pride after seeing your beautiful writing!

You have also been working really hard in our practical maths lesson. We recapped counting to 20, ordering our numbers to 20 and knowing one more than and one less than a given number. You impressed me so much my socks nearly blew off Y1.

As well as completing all of this hard work you have also been working independently in the different areas around the classroom and in the garden. You were so excited to see that our classroom has had a complete makeover so that you have a chance to transition to Y1 through child-initiated play. It has been lovely to watch you learning through play and using your skills independently. You have been playing cafes in the playhouse, digging in the construction area, making mud pies in the mud kitchen, creating postcards in the writing area and using your imagination in the small world area to recreate London.

I am so happy to be your teacher for this year and I can't wait to see you all again on Monday for our very first whole week.

Have a lovely and relaxing weekend.
See you Monday,
Miss Haynes