Year 1 have been very busy so far again in the Spring term. This term we have been studying two brand new authors – Oliver Jeffers who wrote books such as How to Catch a star and This Moose Belongs to Me. The children learnt these stories, learnt some new vocabulary and then wrote a story of their own and wrote an information piece on their favourite animal. We are starting to see the children really utilise their spelling and grammar work within their independent writing and we are all focussing hard on presenting our work neatly.

This half term, our author is Tom Percival who wrote books such as Meesha Makes Friends and  Herman’s Holiday. We will be using these books as inspiration to write a friendship recipe and a postcard.

Our spring term topics have been travel and transport where they used their historical skills to compare and discuss transport of different ears and begin to explain why and how they have changed. 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. Hopefully weather permitting, the children will also be having a walk around our local area where we will go to the local post office to post a letter home, watch this space…..

In our maths work this term the children have utilised their previous learning on numbers to 10 and 20 and begun to identify, order and compare numbers to 50. We have introduced our unit of measure studying how to measure using non-standard equipment (such as cubes) and also beginning to measure objects using a centimetre ruler. We have also been studying mass and capacity, using balance scales and measuring jugs. Any time you are cooking at home, please encourage your child to join in as this will help support this learning.

In our computing lessons the children really enjoyed learning how to program a robot. We used the beebots (which we had previously used in Reception) to program a specific route and journey while also understanding how to debug when things went wrong.

Alan Bean was our Artist that we studied who used to be an astronaut and then became an artist who focussed his work on space pictures.

The children used different resources to create different textures (wellington boots, tin foil, sand, glitter) they then used these skills to create a space background. The children then designed an alien and modelled their alien out of clay! This was so much fun although some children did not like the mess but look how wonderful their work is!