Year 1 news

Our festivities have truly begun in year 1 this week. From opening our advent calendar every day to watching what our cheeky class elf gets up to when we are not there. It's been a whole lot of fun!
During English this week we have continued with our non-fiction topic. Our cheeky elf had jumbled up fiction and non-fiction sentences together so in our teams we sorted them out by reading the sentences and deciding if they were factual or fictional. Some of our fictional sentences were nonsense and made us laugh when we were reading them out to our friends. We then looked at our questions again that we wrote about the Montgolfier brothers and we decided that we could find the answers from a museum, non-fiction book, siri, alexa or google. In our groups we all used Ipads and non-fiction books to find the answers to the questions about the Montgolfier brothers. You all found out some really interesting information! Towards the end of the week we looked at how hot air balloons work because that was one of our biggest questions. We read about it in one of our transport books and we watched a video that made us feel like we were in the hot air balloon. You all wrote some great factual sentences about how hot air balloons go up and down. Can you tell your families what you found out?
In maths this week we finished off our topic of subtraction and adding. Wow can I just say how amazing you all are and how much progress you have made within this topic. At the start, everyone found it really tricky to add and subtract numbers but now you have shown me you can even do it independently. Well done to you all! To ensure we truly understood subtraction and adding we looked at lots of different word problems and we all acted these word problems out so that we could understand how we use adding and subtracting in real life circumstances. We then started our new topic of shapes. Firstly, we looked at 3D shapes and their names. We understood that the shapes can be represented in many different ways. We used a feely bag to pick out 3D shapes and to see if we could recognise them. We looked at how they were different to other shapes in the bag. You then had a picture to look at and you had to see where the 3D shapes were so that you could understand that 3D shapes are all around us. This will help with our shape hunt next week!
In Science this week, we started looking at our new season this week which is winter. We thought about how winter is different to autumn. We thought about how winter affects animals and plants and what we can see happening around us a moment. We had a big science question to answer in our science lesson which was 'Does it rain in winter?' We decided that we would have to find this out by looking at the weather each day and by measuring how much it had rained. In our groups we created a rain gauge which is now in our garden so that each day we can measure how much rain we have had. A couple of times the rain has turned to ice so we were able to talk about why this happens in winter.
In RE, we finished our Christmas story and we used pictures to sequence the story from our memory. Once we sequenced the Christmas story we wrote sentences to describe what was happening at each part of the story. These were lovely and you all worked super hard. With Mrs Swan you created booklets on the meaning of advent. You thought about what each candle means on the advent wreath and why we light them at Christmas time.
In D&T, we looked at wheels and axles. Many of us thought our vehicles move because of the wheels but we didn't realise that all wheels need axles to help them move. We created a wheel and axle by using a paper art straw and two cotton reels. We realised that the axle helps them to move at the same time. We created our own designs of a bus and thought about all of the features that it would have. Next week we are going to start creating our buses. I can't wait to see what they are going to look like!
During History with Mrs Holland you looked at the invention of the Royal Scotsman and the impact this had on transport. We couldn't believe that before the Royal Scotsman it took 12 days to get from London to Edinburgh on horseback and now it only takes 4 hours and 20 minutes. How amazing is that!
All week we have been practicing very hard on our nativity. I am so proud of you all for working so hard on remembering your lines and the lyrics to each song. I can't wait for some more practicing next week so we can see it come to life. On Friday you all put your antlers and red noses on (even Miss Haynes dressed up as a penguin) and we did our Rudolph run with Y2 and Y3 whilst raising money for St. Luke's hospice. Thank you so much everyone for all of your donations that will help to support the lives of many people.
Have a wonderful weekend,
Miss Haynes