Spring 2, Week 5 Parent Blog

                                                                                            This Week in Year 1

English

This week in English, the children retold the story Beegu using puppets. They used the class story map to help them recall the beginning, middle and end of the story. After practising their oral retelling, the children began rewriting the story in their own words. Using their story maps, they wrote each part of the story carefully, focusing on the key events and the order in which they happened. It was lovely to see their confidence grow as they turned their ideas into full sentences.

                                                                                                           Maths

In Maths, the children learnt all about capacity and volume. They explored these concepts using non‑standard units of measure, such as cups, spoons and small containers. The children compared different amounts, predicted which containers held, and enjoyed lots of hands‑on activities involving filling, pouring and estimating. This practical learning helped them develop a strong understanding of how capacity and volume can be measured in everyday life.

                                                                                                         Science

This week in science, the children explored the school grounds to identify and compare different types of plants and trees. They looked closely at wild plants, garden plants, deciduous trees and evergreen trees, using their observations to talk about similarities and differences. The children also investigated how to tell the age of a tree by looking at its rings. Afterwards, they drew their own “tree log” with carefully sketched rings inside, showing what they had learnt about how trees grow over time.

We hope you all enjoy a wonderful Easter holiday filled with rest and sunshine!
Have a fantastic break. See you in the new term!

The Year 1 Team

Spring 2, Week 4 Parent Blog

This Week in Year 1

English

This week in English, the children continued developing their skills through the story Beegu. They focused on learning to orally compose what they want to write, practising saying their sentences out loud before writing them down. Their first main task involved completing sentence stems to explain why Beegu should be allowed to stay in school. They then moved on to writing an introduction and a paragraph describing Beegu’s appearance in detail. Later in the week, the children wrote a letter to Mrs Hobson explaining why Beegu should be allowed to remain in school and why Beegu would make a wonderful part of our community. They learned how to organise their writing into clear chunks, an introduction, a middle section and an ending. They included sentences about how Beegu made them feel and explained their reasons, before finishing with a concluding sentence about why Beegu should stay and signing their name at the bottom.

Maths

In Maths, the children learned how to recognise and find one quarter of an object or shape, as well as understanding that a quarter is one of four equal parts. They explored different shapes and used them to identify halves and quarters, revisiting what they already knew about halves before building their new knowledge. Their table activities included colouring halves and quarters of squared rectangles in different ways and using playdough to make and find halves and quarters of shapes. The children also learned how to recognise and combine quarters as part of one whole and explored how many quarter parts are needed to make a full shape. Linked to this, they completed a puzzle to find out how many whole pizzas could be made using quarter pieces, including both round and square pizzas. Another activity involved making complete shapes using quarter segments.

Science

In Science this week, the children were busy exploring the school grounds and taking part in hands-on planting activities. They planted a variety of herbs, potatoes and flowers, and carefully labelled each plant by identifying the roots, stems and leaves. The class discussed how plants grow and what they need to survive, including soil, water and sunlight. The children also made predictions about how their seeds might grow and what the plants will look like once they develop over time.

Project

In Project lessons this week, the children learned about the term biome and explored two contrasting examples: Saudi Arabia and Alaska. They identified where each place is located on the Earth and discussed why Saudi Arabia has a hot climate while Alaska remains cold throughout the year. The children then designed suitable clothing for Tom, imagining what he would need to wear if he travelled to each location. They also learned about animals living in these climates, tracing and colouring their chosen animal before creating a painted biome background. Once their scenes were finished, they placed their animals into the correct environment.

We hope you have a wonderful weekend!
The Year 1 Team

Spring 2, Week 3 Parent Blog

This Week in Year 1

English

This week in English, the children continued exploring the story of Beegu, building on their understanding of the character by focusing on Beegu’s feelings, appearance and personality. They have been learning how to join words and clauses using ‘and’, and they practised this skill through a variety of writing tasks. For their main activity, the children were given a selection of images from the story and were asked to write descriptive sentences about Beegu, ensuring they used ‘and’ to link their ideas. At their tables, they completed sentence stems by adding ‘and’ sorted descriptive vocabulary into categories such as feelings and appearance and used adjectives to make their descriptions more detailed. Later in the week, the children created lost posters to help “find” Beegu. They added labels and full sentences that described Beegu’s used ‘and’ to extend their writing.

Maths

In Maths, the children focused on recognising place value in numbers up to 20. Using concrete materials such as dienes, they explored how numbers are made up of tens and ones. They took part in a range of activities that strengthened this understanding, including matching numbers to the correct tens and ones, colouring pictorial representations accurately, and identifying and representing numbers through objects and pictures. They also practised using mathematical vocabulary such as equal to, more than, less than, fewer, most and least. In addition, the children counted objects such as flowers and wrote the number that was one more and one less. They completed sequences by identifying numbers that were smaller or greater than the given number.

Science

We celebrated Science Day this week with a full day of hands‑on activities. The children began by designing posters focused on the theme of what a positive childhood might look like in the future and the things we can do to keep our brains healthy and calm. They then took part in an investigation called Peggy Problems, where they explored the strength and grip of different types of pegs by counting how many marbles each peg could hold. Their next activity, Brilliant Birds, involved collecting natural materials from the playground to build their own bird nests. Once the nests were complete, the class came together to compare them and discuss which designs were the most effective and why.

Project

In Project lessons this week, the children learned how rain is measured and created a rain gauge, which were placed outside to observe weekly rainfall. They also discovered how windsocks work and how wind direction is measured before making their own windsocks using different materials. As part of their geography work, the children explored a world map, tracing over different countries and locating the United Kingdom. They also identified and labelled Alaska and Saudi Arabia, growing more confident in using maps to understand the world around them.

We hope you have a wonderful weekend!
The Year 1 Team

Spring 2, Week 2 Parent Blog

This Week in Year 1

This week, the children in Year 1 have been working extremely hard on their checkpoints. They showed great perseverance, listened carefully, and approached each checkpoint with a positive attitude. We are incredibly proud of their hard work—well done, Year 1!

Project

In Project lessons this week, the children learnt about different types of weather and the four seasons. They explored what a weather forecast is, looking carefully at the symbols used, what the presenter says, and how the information is shown. The children then had a go at writing their own short script to describe the weather. They enjoyed pretending to be weather presenters and took turns sharing their forecasts with the class. To finish, the children answered questions on their worksheet based on a weather forecast they had seen.

Science

For Science this week, the children spent time closely observing fruits, vegetables and flowers. They examined them carefully, looking at every detail both inside and outside. After discussing what they noticed, the children drew each fruit or vegetable first as a whole and then as a half, labelling the different parts. They repeated this activity with the flowers, taking time to explore their shapes, colours and structures before creating detailed labelled drawings.

We hope you have a lovely weekend!
The Year 1 Team

Spring 2, Week 1 Parent Blog

This Week in Year 1

English

This week in English, the children began reading a new book called Beegu. They have enjoyed getting to know the story and have started answering both retrieval and inference questions during whole‑class sessions and at their tables. As part of their table tasks, the children completed comprehension activities, matched sentences to the correct pictures and sequenced events using images and short texts. They also started writing captions for pictures from the story and learned about sentence structure by deciding which of two given sentences was correct.

Maths

In Maths, the children learnt about the days of the week, the months of the year and the order of the seasons. They also practised telling the time to the hour and half past, using clocks and hands‑on activities to help deepen their understanding.

Project

In Project lessons, the children began learning about the United Kingdom. They explored how many countries make up the UK, where it is located on a map and the different seasons experienced here. The children also found out about the flags of each country as well as the Union Flag. They have started learning about the capital cities of each country and have discussed some of the main features of these cities.

Science

We had a whole day of science this week to celebrate Science Day. The children began the morning with a science poster competition. Their task was to design a poster based on the theme of what a positive childhood will look like in the future and the things we need to keep doing to keep our brains healthy and calm.

After completing their posters, the children took part in an activity called Peggy Problems, where they explored the strength of different pegs. They investigated what materials worked well with pegs and discussed what makes a peg strong and effective.

Their second activity was called Brilliant Birds. The children gathered natural materials from around the school playground and used them to build their own bird nests. Once the nests were completed, the class came together to compare them and discuss which nest they thought was the most successful and why.

We hope you have a lovely weekend!
The Year 1 Team