Year 1 weekly newsletter

Wow what a zootastic week we have had in year one!
In English, we have carried on with our learning of recounts. We have found out that recounts are a piece of writing written about an event in chronological order. You understood that recounts may be found in newspapers or interviews. You boxed up our recount on 'class two at the zoo' to find out what needs to be included. We found out that the introduction is really important because it gives a brief description of what happened, who was there and where it took place. Next, you then created a recount toolkit so that we can innovate 'class two at the zoo'. We looked at our piece of text and picked out all of the verbs, adjectives and sequential words e.g. next, after that and finally. On Friday we started our innovation of the text by creating a recount plan on our trip to Chester zoo. I know we are very excited to do a shared write on this and share it in our study work books. I am looking forward to seeing you put all of your knowledge of recounts together to create your own.
In maths, we finished our topic off by doing lots of work around comparing addition and subtraction sums using the language of more than, less than or equals to. You have all developed a very good understanding of place value to 20 so that you know which numbers are greater and which numbers are smaller. This is really going to help you in your next topic of place value to 50. We finished the week off with lots of problem solving in maths. You had to look carefully at the language in the problems to see if they are asking you to add or takeaway the numbers. We found out that on most occasions 'more' means to add and 'fewer' means to take away. You have all worked super hard this week consolidating your knowledge so that we are ready to move onto numbers to 50 next week.
In science, we have been concentrating on the animal classes. You now all know how to identify if an animal is a: mammal, bird, fish, amphibian or reptile. We have learnt that these are all vertebrates because they have a back bone. You have looked at the structure of each of these animals and labelled a diagram of an animal from each category. We decided that the easiest way to identify is looking at the outer body: has it got hair, scales, slimy skin, dry scales or feathers? Through this we have also concentrated on learning the names for common animals including pets. You labelled a photo from each category and independently identified the class of the animal and its name. We used our scientific knowledge a lot at Chester zoo and I found that many of you were asking questions to see what type of animals they were.
In RE we started our new topic on forgiveness. We looked at different scenarios and explained which scenarios people were showing good or bad choices. We thought about what people can do if they have made a bad choice. We decided that the best thing to do is always say sorry for our own actions. Then we can ask for forgiveness from people and a new beginning. The children were given the scenario of: Someone has just pushed you on the playground. Do you push them back? Or do you wait until they have apologised? We decided that two wrongs don't make a right and that we are better people if we don't retaliate. In your R.E books you wrote about the times you have all said sorry and times when you have asked for forgiveness to help us understand the importance of saying sorry at that time.
In Geography, you sorted out pictures of the main things that are in hot and cold places. You then made a list of all the cold things e.g. ice caps, mountains, polar bears and then all of hot things e.g. desert, Savannah, equator. You also worked together to create a world map using a floor puzzle. You then discussed all of the hot places on the map and all of the cold places and what you may see there. You identified the equator, North and South Pole on the map and spoke about all of the different continents.
We have had an amazing week visiting Chester zoo and enjoying world book day. I am still incredibly proud of how well you behaved and presented yourselves at Chester zoo. It was the highlight of our week and has helped the learning of our topic so much. World book day costumes were brilliant and it was a very special day to share our love of reading together. We shared our books with our friends, we read some of them out to the whole class and we talked about why our costumes represented our favourite authors and books. You then went out on the playground with the whole school and you played lots of reading and author challenges. It was a great day!
Hope you all have a lovely weekend.
See you Monday,
Miss Haynes