This week has been full of lots of enjoyable activities! The children started their tennis lessons on Monday and loved it. They are learning to persevere to develop their skills as tennis can actually be quite tricky to begin with. On Tuesday, we went on our first school trip to Beale Park and everyone had a wonderful day! We saw a variety of animals but the two favourites were the capybaras and baby meerkats (they were so cute)! We went on a train ride around the park and spotted lots more animals along the way. Each class took part in a fun workshop and learnt all about the different things’ animals need to survive. The children had the opportunity to hold a hissing cockroach and stroke a royal python called Mandy. Everyone was great sports and listened very well during the workshop. They certainly made us teachers proud.

In maths this week, we recapped place value and spent some time talking about the value of a number and how many tens and ones it has. We practised our number formation again and did lots of counting!  Next week in maths, we will be learning to use the skill of bridging when adding 2 numbers together. We will recap number bonds to ten and use them to help us add in two parts, stopping at the 10 first and then adding the remaining. This will be great preparation for Year 2 maths! 

In English this week, the children have been exploring a range of poems all about the summer. We have been looking at the patterns and rhyme in the poems. Before the English lessons, we created a summer collage, which we used to help create a summer word bank. We used this word bank to create our own summer poems using the format of word, phrase, word, phrase. Next week, we will be continuing our unit based on Greta and the Giants, focusing on persuasive sentences. This will lead up to us writing a persuasive letter to the Giants to stop them destroying the forest.

On Friday, we had another speedy walk to Hart Leisure Centre for our second swimming lesson. It was amazing seeing how confident the children were in the water and the progression they had made in such little time. Swimming lessons will continue next Friday so please make sure your child has their swimming kit with them.

Just a few reminders:   

• Please make sure all your child’s belongings are labelled. Things do go missing and I’m convinced there is a black hole somewhere in the school that sucks them in and they never come back.   
• Please send your child’s water bottle and book bag into school every day.  
• Tennis lessons will resume on Monday so please make sure PE kits are in school.
• Reading books in school are changed once a week and this will be every Monday. The books will be collected in in the morning and a new one will be issued that same afternoon.  
• Library books are changed on a Friday during our library time. The children are also welcome to change their books during lunchtimes when the library is open. 

Dates:  

• Thursday 20^th June – Swimming
• Thursday 27^th June – Swimming

We like to think of ourselves as a friendly and approachable team and if there is anything you have concerns about, please let us know and we will do our best to help.  

Have a lovely weekend and enjoy the sunshine!

Miss Sheppard and the Year 1 team.