Dinosaur Footprints

Happy Half Term! On Wednesday, we had such a fun day making ginormous dinosaur footprints out of paper mache. It was a very messy job but the children and adults loved getting involved and the results are brilliant! Thank you so much to Arlo’s mum who came in to help in Bumblebee Class and then repeated the whole process again in Hedgehog Class and she still had a smile on her face! A fun way to end the first half of the spring term!

In English this week, we have been learning about the past tense. We have learnt that -ed is a suffix that can be added to words to change them into the past tense. We have been changing words by adding -ed and writing sentences using the -ed words. We also learnt about plurals. We sorted words into plurals and non plurals then we sorted the words into those with -es and those with -s on the end. After half term, we will be focussing on the book ‘How to look after your Dinosaur’ by Jason Cockcroft. We will start the week by learning about the un- prefix and we will be applying this in sentences. Then we will be beginning to recognise that instructions have adverbs, verbs and time connectives. We will be thinking about and role-playing how to look after a dinosaur so that we can know the sequence of instructions and understand how they should be carried out.

In maths this week, we have been learning about subtraction and learning about the concept of taking away. We started the week with using practical resources to take away and we focussed on the language involved when taking away such as minus, take away, less than. We then moved on to exploring pictures and representations that show taking away, and we wrote number sentences to match these. After that, we applied our understanding to create number stories for taking away. After half term, we will be practising reading, writing and ordering numbers to 100. We will also be finding 1 more and 1 less of numbers to 100.

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.  
• Our Year 1 PE day is on a Monday.  
• 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:  

Friday 9^th February – Last day of term
Monday 19^th February – Back to school
Tuesday 20^th February – Curriculum Information Evening 7pm
Friday 8^th March – Mothers’ Day Shop
Saturday 16^th March – The Big TAFF tidy up
Thursday 28^th March – TAFF Pre-Loved uniform and tuck shop
Thursday 28^th March – Last day of term
Monday 15^th April – Back to school

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 wonderful half term and we look forward to seeing you all on Monday 19^th February.

Mrs Ford and the Year 1 team.