A warm welcome to Year 1!

Hello and welcome to our Year 1 blog. We will be keeping you up to date with what the children have been learning about each half term. – so slightly different to last year! 

The children have settled so beautifully already and it’s been lovely seeing all their smiling faces. They have enjoyed painting self-portraits and using different materials to make their class animal. They have also enjoyed building using different construction materials, inside and outside of the classroom!

In Year 1, we start the year with COOL (Choose Our Own Learning) Time. In our COOL time, we set up play-based learning opportunities similar to what your child has experienced in Year R. For the first half term, the majority of our learning is carried out through small groups in a similar way to Year R. We do this because we firmly believe children need that time to transition from Year R to Year 1 as the expectations are higher. When it is appropriate, we start to move towards more formal whole class teaching, where children are expected to work more independently.

Your child will have received a home reading book and a red diary. Reading is such an important life skill for the children to learn so please support us by listening to your child read their home reading book and remember to sign the diary several times a week. It is also just as important for them to hear you reading them books so that you can model reading fluently and with expression.

This term, in English, the children will be learning to write simple sentences with capital letters, full stops and finger spaces, with increasing independence. In Year 1, we will be looking at a variety of different texts as a focus for our writing this term. For example, using ‘Oi Frog’ with the focus on rhyming words and ‘You Choose’ with the focus on writing a list.

In Maths, the children will be doing lots of counting and learning about place value. They will be drawing and using part-part whole models to show how numbers can be split into parts. We will also be beginning to learn number bonds for numbers between 5 and 10. You can help at home by practising counting, spotting numbers in everyday life, and talking about how numbers can be made in different ways.

Our topic this term is The Great Fire of London. This is a history-based topic so the children will be sequencing the event, doing some role-play and looking closely at different historical sources, The children will have Enrichment on Tuesday afternoons. Bumblebees will be doing some lovely wellbeing activities and spending time in our wonderful garden. Hedgehogs will be in the library and ICT suite. 

Just a few reminders: 

• Please make sure all your child’s belongings are labelled. 

• Please send your child’s water bottle and book bag into school every day.

• Our Year 1 PE day is on a Thursday so please make sure their PE kit is in school.

• We are lucky to have school snacks provided for snack time so please don’t bring in snacks from home.

• Reading books in school are changed once a week and this will be every Monday. The books will be collected in the morning and a new one will be issued that same day.

Thank you for your support and have a lovely weekend,

The Year 1 Team.