Year 1 have been very busy so far again. Last half term we studied our author Tom Percival who wrote books such as Meesha Makes Friends and Herman’s Holiday. We wrote a postcard pretending that we had been on holiday! This term our new author is Nadia Shireen who wrote books such as Billy and the Dragon and Billy and the Beast. So far, these books are proving to be very popular and the children have been learning how to write a character description to describe the dragon and the beast using adjectives and adventurous vocabulary that they have learnt through the stories.

We are still working hard to ensure that children always use capital letters, finger spaces and full stops and can read their work for coherence. This half term our topic is Our local area, where the children will be come Geographers and identify features of our local area and start to create their own maps (both 2D and 3D) using a simple key. We were able to complete our walk and were very lucky with the weather and I hope you enjoyed receiving their letters. The children were amazing on our walk, were very safe and observant – their favourite local feature they spotted was Tesco!

Our Summer term topic is Rochdale Now and Then and we have once again received some wonderful homework examples that are on display in both Year 1 classrooms.  In this topic the children are discussing and identifying the similarities and differences between Rochdale in the past and present day. In our maths work this term the children have utilised their previous learning on numbers to 50 and will build on this in our next number topic of numbers to 100. We have begun introducing fractions to our children. We have been finding halves and quarters of different shapes and quantities, introduced position and direction where we have been looking at half turns, quarter turns, three quarter turns as well as looking at left and right, forwards and backwards. We will finish the maths work in Year 1 learning about money and time. In our computing lessons the children have been exploring a keyboard and using word processor to begin to type, change the font and size of the font and also to understand the bold and italic uses.

A lot of the children find using the laptop difficult as they are used to touch screens so it is an important lesson that they need to really practice on. Last half term we had the DT topic – Teddy Bear’s picnic and the children had to design, make and evaluate a fruit kebab. This was lots of fun and even the children who didn’t like fruit still experienced designing and making a fruit kebab and most children loved eating it at the end! This half term we are developing our sketching skills for our topic – Can buildings speak? We have studied the works of art by two artists Paul Klee Castle in the Sun and LS Lowry.