The Summer Term Begins!

WOW! The first week of the summer term is complete already! I hope you all had a lovely Easter break and managed to enjoy some nice days out. We’ve got so much planned for the term ahead, we will all be exhausted by the end of it! We have started our brand new, exciting topic…How Does Your Garden Grow? The children are very excited about and we’ve got lots of exciting activities planned. The artwork they have produced already this week is amazing of Monet’s Japanese bridge.

In Maths, we have started to learn about multiplication. We have been learning to recognise the repeated addition and writing the number sentence to match. We have been using practical apparatus all week and we have been using the language at the beginning stages of learning multiplication. E.g. lots of, altogether, repeated addition, sets of, times. Next week, we will be moving onto division. We will start by practising sharing out different amounts of cubes between 2 children. We will share the cubes out one at a time and then count how many each child has to find the answer. Next, we will practise sharing out the cubes between 3 children and then try sharing between 4 children. We will also be learning how to solve problems by grouping. We will count how many groups there are in different numbers.

In our English lessons over the next three weeks, we will be using The Magical Garden of Claude Monet to act as a stimulus for a piece of descriptive writing. In our first session we went out to our own school garden and used large frames to see the garden from different perspectives. We thought about our senses to describe what we could see, hear, touch and smell. After that, we looked at the Claude Monet paintings hanging in our garden. We looked at the paintings closely and described what we could see to a friend. We spent the rest of the week focussing on describing nouns, using powerful adjectives. Next week, we will learn about the suffixes ‘er’ and ‘est’. We will work in pairs to compare different flowers, and when describing the flowers, we will add ‘er’ and ‘est’ to the adjectives. We will also learn about the difference between ‘er’ and ‘est’, and when to use each one appropriately. We will then practise orally composing and writing sentences using these suffixes. Towards the end of the week, we will practise writing compound sentences using the connective ‘and’.

In History this term, we will be speaking about the area we live in. We will answer questions such as: Where do we live? Where is our school? What is Fleet? What do we know about Fleet? What is in Fleet? What can you do in Fleet? Has Fleet always been here? How do you know and why? We will create a mind map of what we know about Fleet today. We will then take some time to look at a range of pictures of Fleet through the ages. We will answer questions such as: Can we recognise any of the places? What can we find out through these pictures? How old are some of the photos? How do you know? Can we sort the photos from oldest to newest or olden days to now? We will discuss what a timeline is and as a class, we will have a go at arranging the photos in time order. We will have a lot of fun and a lot of discussions about what Fleet used to look like, including Tavistock Infant School! 

In Geography this term, we will be doing some fieldwork and brushing up on our map reading skills. We will be designing maps of our own classrooms, our school and our surrounding area of Fleet. We will be learning about symbols and using them on our own maps accordingly. We will also learn about coordinates and how to locate an item using this method. We will also be comparing the difference between physical and man-made features.

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:  

Monday 6th May – Bank Holiday
8th May – Skipping Workshops
Friday 10th May – TAFF bring a Cake mufti
Saturday 11^th May – TAFF May Fair
WB 20^th May – Walk to School Week
Friday 24^th May – TAFF Scavenger Hunt
WB 27^th May – Half Term

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.  

Mrs Ford and the Year 1 team.