Coming up this week

In the Year 1 classrooms this week children will be learning...

in maths about subtraction.
in English to mix up a traditional tale, we will be mixing up Goldilocks and the Three Bears.
in handwriting the letter b and p.
in science we will be continuing to group animals and to find their characteristics and features.

Keep checking in with us this week, it's a short week but is going to be busy and we have some great pirate art to show you soon!

Writing in Year One

Year One are doing so well in their writing. We are trying hard to remember our magic 3

finger spaces

capital letters

full stops. 

Each  Sunday we write about our weekend. First we talk about our weekend and then say out loud what we want to write before finally writing it. Through the rest of the week we look at a story and take part in different learning centres from that story. At the moment we are looking at a traditional tale, Goldilocks and the Three Bears.  Have a look at some pieces of writing from Year One.

Let us know what you think of our writing in the comments.

Animals... what are they???

Some Year One children have written this post for our learning community they want your help with their science learning.

In science we are talking about animals. There are birds, reptiles, fish, amphibians and mammals.

These are some things we have learnt...
The reptiles are cold blooded and they lay eggs and they sometimes hunt for their prey. - Kingston
Mammals are warm blooded. - Jessica
Crocodiles have sharp teeth and they are looking for things that are meat. - Mansour
Fish suck up water in their gills and there is little bits of air in the water for them to breathe. - Celine T
Birds have feathers and they lay eggs and they have a beak. - Malak

Can you help us with our science learning by telling us examples of a mammal, fish, bird, reptile and amphibians? We want to draw these in our science books.

What's in the bag?

Today in maths we started looking at 2D shapes.

The shared area was a buzz of shape hunters, all on the look out for shapes.

In class we were describing shapes in feely bags. Mohammed told us that his shape had 4 sides and 4 corners. Can you guess what it is? ...

We couldn't either so we asked Mohammed to give us more information. Mansour offered up an idea to Mohammed about the sides, Mansour said "the same or different?" Mohammed told us the sides were 2 long and 2 short. We guessed it was a rectangle! And we were right.

Can you describe a shape for us in the comments so we can guess what it is?

Coming up...

Firstly thank you to all the lovely families who came to visit the teachers last week at conferences. It is always lovely to meet the families of the children.

This week in Year One we are hoping to hear from Pirate Pat again, we are loving playing in his pirate ship and hope he doesn't mind us using it. 

Also on Wednesday it is English open morning, where we will be opening our classrooms up for our parents to come in and have a look at what we do in English. 

In the classroom Year 1 children will be learning...

in maths about 2D shapes and measuring in non standard units.

in English to write sentences from the story Goldilocks and the Three Bears. 

in handwriting to write the letter h.

in science to identify the features and characteristics of animals. 

as well as continuing our pirate-ey fun.

Keep checking in with us through the week to see how all this learning is going. We might have some great Goldilocks and the Three Bears writing to show you.

Breaking News!

Mrs Armstrong has been captured by a group of pirates and made to walk the plank! Who will rescue her?

The Book Fair

This week all of Year One have been to visit the book fair. We really enjoyed looking at all of the books. We found some old favourites and some new favourites too. Here are some photos of the Year One children sharing their new books. 

 Let us know your favourite book in the comments.

Ships are sailing in!

We are starting to get Pirate Ships sailing into Year One. Check out what has already arrived. Some children have spent a lot of time with their adult creating an amazing ship. The teachers are loving  seeing everyone's creativity.

Live from Chris White... a real life author.

Right now Year One and Two are listening to Chris White tell us all about his books. He is a real life author. 

At the moment he is getting us to warm up our voices by singing in silly voices. We are finding it really funny. 

Chris just asked us what we were going to do next and he had some funny suggestions. 

Let's...

Jog with a sausage dog

Get funky with a monkey 

bake a cake with a snake

go ball kickin with a  chicken

visit the moon with a raccoon

make a fuss of a walrus

It turns out Chris was reading his poem. If we use our imagination we can do all of these things!

Chris is so exciting, we will be here for another hour. Later we will comment what our favourite thing Chris tell us is, i'm sure it will be exciting!

Have a look at Chris White's website! veggievampire.com And let us know what you think. 

Talking Chips

Today the Larks tried a new talking strategy, we wanted to talk about what we were going to write our sentences about. We worked in small groups talking and listening.

We each had 3 talking chips and could only talk when we were putting a chip down, the rest of the time we had to listen to our group. We also had to use all of our talking chips so we had to think carefully about what we did on the weekend to have three things to say.

We are going to continue to use talking chips in Larks to make sure we are all learning to talk and share our ideas equally.

Here is how Larks explain the talking chips.

"When you hold the talking chip you are aloud to speak." Katrina

"When you speak and when you are done you put it down and its the other peoples turn." Arnav

" The talking chips said talk so when you talk to someone you talk about the weekend and you talk about what you did" Kingston

"The talking chips help us to see who is talking and have turns."  Hannah

Check back with us again soon, Larks want to put up a video of themselves using talking chips!

Coming up...

This week in Year 1 will be exciting. Pirate Pat is still about and has moved in a pirate ship.  We also have the book fair in school and it is parent teacher conferences.

 

In the classroom Year 1 children will be learning...
 

 in maths new strategies for addition to 20.

 in English to orally retell and act out Goldilocks and the Three Bears.

in handwriting to write the letters n and m.

in science to identify and classify animals in science.

 

as well as loads of pirate talk and fun!

Check in with us later in the week to see how all of this learning goes.

Miss Neville's Assembly

Today in assembly Miss Neville reminded us about gratitude. We saw all of the people Miss Neville is grateful for in her life. After assembly Miss Neville sent us a story about Splat who thanks his friend that he is grateful for by making a book, we read this together and talked about who we are grateful for.

Jessica is grateful for her brother who hugs her alot.

Malak is grateful for her teacher who helps children to take turns.

Kingston is thankful for Ted and Mary who are funny and make him laugh. 

Talya is thankful for her teacher because she likes to learn.

Celine is thankful for all the world because it is friendly world to be in.

Molly is thankful for her friends who play with her.

Ali is thankful for his dad who picks him up from school.

Mohammed is thankful for his sister who helped him learn his numbers. 

We are all grateful for Miss Neville. Thank you for your assembly.  

Have a look at Splats story below. Leave us a comment about who you are thankful for in your life and how do you let them know?

Larks are Reading ebooks

On Wednesday in Larks we tried something new for reading our shared book. Miss Gorman put us in pairs with an ipad. We found Oxford Owl and the ebook Pirate Adventure. Together we read the story helping each other sound out words and join in when we could, it was great having a partner from another reading group to help us with our reading. When we had finished the story we worked together on our ipads to do the activities. We had two activities to do on the ipad, first we had to label a pirate ship and a pirate, next we had to use picture clues to help with comprehension of the story. We all loved reading on the ipads and are excited to be active learners in our shared book again soon. 

You can read ebooks on Oxford Owl as well.Check the link on the side of this blog. 

New Golden Table Winners!

Hillary house have got 10 star balls! Look at them having lunch at the golden table!

 

Well done Hillary Cuckoos!

 

Who will be next?

Golden Table Winners

In Key Stage One our children try really hard to move to and from break times quietly and sensibly. We are a big school and we always have to think about other people when we walk around school. It's not always easy to do when you're excited to get out to break.

Mrs Davey has started a golden table at lunch which all of the children are very excited about. Every time we walk to and from break well we get to put a star ball in our house jar, the first house to 10 balls gets to have lunch at the golden table.

The Rowling Larks and the Armstrong Doves have already eaten at the golden table, where we have special table cloths and placemats, star decorations and a special lunch box note to take home. Have a look at the photos of the Year One golden table winners!

Ps. One of the children's favourite things about this is they get to work together with their Year 2 house class, have a look over at Year 2 and see their golden table winners too.

Small World Storytelling

Today in the shared area Ella and Keira were in our new small world area telling stories together. Mrs Dow recorded one of their stories.

Leave a comment and let the girls know what you think about their story.

Shocking Sunday!

Sunday started with quite a shock! When we came in to start our day someone had been in our shared area and made such a mess, chairs were tipped over, paper was thrown all over the place, even our kitchen was pushed over.

 

Also who ever had been in our shared area had dropped some important things...gold, feathers and a treasure chest. When we looked closer we could see a hat and a sword. We started to think our shared area had been overturned by a pirate!

Who could it be?

Some of the children found letters on really really old paper tied up with string. This naughty pirate had left us a letter. We found out that a pirate called Pat had come to our shared area. The pirate must have snuck in while the teachers were in the playground, because no one knew a thing, not even our classroom assistants saw anything!

We are waiting to hear from Pirate Pat again soon and while we wait we are learning all we can about Pirates so we can help Pirate Pat be the best pirate. So far we know that pirates wear hats or bandannas, have swords or cutlass and live on a ship with a flag.

We need all the help we can get with this learning. 

Can you help us to learn about pirates? 

What do you know about pirates? 

Number Bonds and the Cuckoos in Action!

Number bonds have been the focus for Year 1 in maths.

We have been using all sorts of equipment to work out our number bonds and playing lots of practical games. Most of us were working on our number bonds to 10. 

We helped each other and checked our puzzles and games carefully to make sure we were putting the right two numbers together to make 10.

The Cuckoos had loads of fun doing this in their maths groups. 

"We liked making new things with all the numbers."

 - Elise, Cuckoos-

"I was doing the bus game and you have to write down the  numbers to make 10."  

- Isabella, Cuckoos-

Our Amazing Assembly

Today we had an assembly in Year 1 and together we wrote this blog post.

Our assembly was about all of the things we have done that were exciting.

We had a look at our blog and our map.

We saw all the people all around the world who have seen our blog on the map.

We are really excited to share our blog with our family and friends.

Can you leave us a comment?

Spotlight on Sparrows English

Check out what the Sparrows have been doing in English over the last couple of weeks. They have been learning to sort objects by their initial sound. Can you see what objects they have sorted? What are their initial sounds?

Other Sparrows were working hard at writing CVC words on whiteboards in continuous cursive style. They had to use their phonics skills to segment the word they were writing. Can you read what Lara has written on her board? 

Mindful Jars

Recently in Year One we have made mindful jars.

The jars help to calm our amygdala, which is like the guard dog in our brain. When things are really crazy and we feel a little jumbled up, stressed or unsettled our guard dog is on guard. To get our amygdala and our brain calm again we can use our mindful jars.

We made our mindful jars so that we can do this at home and we have a special class jar for in school. We shake our jars up and then mindfully watch them only focusing on the pretty glitter in our jars as it settles and as it settles so does our brain.

We watched this youtube video that further explains what is happening in our mindful jar. Take a look if you are interested in these jars.

Here are some photos of the Cuckoos making their jars.

Creativity Assembly

On Thursday in assembly we learnt what it means to be creative. We had some great examples of creativity shared by our Year 5 and 6 students. We listened to some instruments and a singer, we looked at some artists working and we all thought how we could be creative.

What do you think creativity is? Comment on this post and let us know.

Smelly Science

At the moment in Science we are doing experiments to test our sense of smell. We had to smell mystery cups and see if we could work out what was in each cup, some of them smelt delicious and others were not so great.

In the Larks class some of the children were heard saying, "It smells like cupcakes." "It smells like nesquick powder." "It smells like chips." so they had to think what was in each of those things that the smell might be. Can you guess?

We learnt that it is our nose that does the smelling for us. It was difficult to justify why we knew what we were smelling like chocolate, vanilla, vinegar, fish, perfume and lots of others so we started describing the smells and then it became a little easier.  It was great to be able to talk our learning through and be challenge by our friends and teachers with tricky questions.

Check out our pictures of our science experiment. Sometimes we made funny faces when we didn't like the smell!

Year One Parent Picnic

Sometimes learning is so exciting you just have to show it off! So on Thursday afternoon we asked our mums, dads, nannies and special adults to come in and share in our learning to finish off our marvellous topic 'Marvellous Me'.

During english last week we had designed fruit faces, first we drew our fruit faces, then we labelled each part and finally we wrote a shopping list for the supermarket.

Then on Thursday afternoon we were so excited to share the task of making our fruit faces and enjoy eating them with our visitors. Some of the cutting was tricky, we had help from our adults to learn a new DT skill of cutting with safe knives. Our picnic was so exciting that other adults from the school came to have a look at our amazing faces.  We loved showing off our learning and loved having visitors to our learning space.  Have a look at our wonderful picnic photos below.