Year 1 news

What a fun and exciting week we have had year one. This week we have been abstracts artists, country comparers and powerful poets.
In English this week, we finished our innovation traditional tale thinking about how we can end our stories. Was it a happy ending or a sad ending? We then moved onto our independent writing. You created an independent plan to how you would open a traditional tale. Once you had finished your plan you all independently wrote your story opener. Thinking about how we start a traditional tale, how you introduce your characters and setting. These were amazing to read and I was so proud of how many of you remembered your capital letters, full stops and finger spaces. Your writing has improved so much and I and Mrs VR are ever so proud of your progress. On Friday we moved away from writing and treated ourselves to some performance poetry. We looked at a poem called 'walking around a zoo' we read through it and put some actions to the poem. Once you performed this poem you then went off into your small groups to create the next verse. You all created the next verse on your favourite animal thinking about what we may see that animal doing if we were walking around a zoo. These verses were so good that we had to put them all together to create our year 1 poem. We are going to create and perform some more zoo poems next week and we will share them on YouTube for you to watch.
In reading you are continuing to go to phonics in your small groups. We also have a whole class session in the afternoon to help recap any sounds that we may find difficult. Your progress has been so good and I cannot believe that some of you are confident to stand up and read in front of the whole school in assembly. It fills me with pride!
In maths we have spent this week finishing our addition topic off. You have been finding easier ways to add within 20 by making 10 first. You have also shown consolidation of this topic by using addition to solve real life word problems. You then created your own word problems to show 8+5. With something that I thought we would find difficult you have absolutely smashed it! We will now be moving onto subtraction within 20.
This week we have been spending our afternoons enjoying and learning about interfaith week. We focused our learning on the country of South Africa. We understood that 80% of the population believe in Christianity which is more than our country. We then found that the other 3 main religions in the country are Islam, Judaism and Hinduism. We found out that the places of worship in South Africa are a church, synagogue, mosque and a temple. We then did some learning about the native tribe 'Zulus'. We learnt that their religion was a mix of traditional and Christianity beliefs. Did you know that the Zulu God is called 'unkulunkulu' and Zulus believe that he was the creator of the world and that he taught his people how to hunt and make fire? We learnt about their holy days 'Riverbed reed dance' and 'King Shaka day'. We then learnt some Zulu dancing and practiced this in the classroom. We were also treated to a virtual reality aboriginal workshop. This was amazing and helped to teach us all about the aboriginals of Australia. We learnt about how they believe their world was created, their snake dancing and we also managed to play some hunting games.
In Geography you looked at the Antarctica so that you could compare this continent to your hot country of Kenya. You found out that the landscape was made up of an ice sheet, lakes, ice caps and oceans. You found out that the animals that are brave enough to live in Antarctica are penguins, killer whales, albatrosses and seals. We looked at all of the differences between the south pole and a place on the equator. You found all of this information out and then wrote a fact file. We then wrote our fact files neatly on nice paper ready for our first page in our study book.
In music you were given your second workshop of 'Betty Bear goes to the zoo'. We are really enjoying singing all of our zoo songs using actions to help remember the words.
In computing this week you used the 'chatterapp' to create a picture of a talking animal. You then recorded yourself saying a fact about the animal you took a picture of. Some of you even got as far as creating a background for the picture.
In art we continued our learning of 'Kandinsky'. We recapped our primary colours and watched our favourite video to show the colour they change to when they are mixed. We then learnt that paintings can create a mood. We looked at some paintings and decided how they would make us feel you came out with some great ideas 'happy, excited, sad, upset, angry.' We looked at how some colours in art are cool or warm colours. These colours can change our mood. You then sorted these colours in your sketch book into warm and cool so that you can remember them. We then looked at the famous Kandinsky 'concentric circle' painting and then created our own circles using the warm and cool colours we had learnt about.
We spent our Friday enjoying celebration show and tell. We even got time to share some of the wonderful bingo homework you keep bringing in! We had a special mystery reader from year 2 who read the ' The very hungry caterpillar' so confidently to our class. We had another wonderful mystery reader for year 1 from Emilie's mummy you all listened so beautifully to a funny story about zoo animals. Thank you both to our mystery readers! We then finished our day with an interfaith worship to celebrate all of our learning that we have done over this week.
These weeks are flying by but I am loving every moment of teaching you. You are all superstars!
Have a super weekend with lots of rest.
See you on Monday,
Miss Haynes