YEAR 1 2019 - 2020

Ms Challenor

Miss Jackson

Spring 2020

Hello and welcome to the Year 1 page!

Below I hope you will find some useful information about life in Year 1.

Important information about our school routine:

Year 1 children will register in Ms. Challenor's classroom (the classroom opposite the library, next to Mrs Jones' room) in the mornings. They should be in the classroom by 8:55 am, as register closes at 9:00. Home time is 15:20.

We are so lucky to have a number of adults, including volunteers, who read with our children multiple times weekly. Please ensure your child has their reading book and yellow reading record in their bag every day so that we can help support your child with their reading progress!

PE lessons are on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons - please ensure that children have the correct kit in school. The kit is plain black shorts/leggings/jogging bottoms, a plain white t-shirt and trainers or pumps.

Homework is set on Fridays and should be handed in the following Thursday.

We want to be a healthy school, full of happy children who know how to make good choices when it comes to nutrition. Therefore, snacks brought in from home for morning breaktime must be fresh fruit or vegetables (e.g. cucumber, tomatoes or carrots) and drinks in bottles should be water. Please save those chocolate bars for treats at home!

Topic

Our topic this term is...

THE SPACE RACE!

Get ready to jet off on an interstellar, cosmic adventure as we travel back in time to the 20th Century to examine one of mankind's greatest achievements - space travel!

During this fascinating and inspirational topic, we will learn about the key events of space exploration and travel. We will delve into areas including: the earliest V-2 flights post WW2; the missions that sent the first living creatures into space; man's journeys to the Moon; the creation of the ISS; probes on Mars; and the possibility for future space tourism.

English

Ms Challenor will be teaching Year 1 children their English lessons daily. We will be reading some fantastic stories based on our topic, 'The Space Race'.

We will continue to focus on the foundations of written language: creating our own sentences, sequencing them to create narratives and texts from a range of other genres, learning to spell the most common English words, applying our Phonics and Spelling rules for Year 1 and using basic punctuation with increasing confidence.

Phonics and Spelling

Phonics is a really important part of our Literacy learning in Year 1, and children will build their skills in both reading and writing. Children have already made a super start in Autumn Term, and we will continue to follow the 'Letters and Sounds' framework in Year 1 that the children have started to learn previously. We will also be learning the Year 1 spelling rules from the National Curriculum.

Regular phonics sessions will allow the children to gain new skills which they can then apply to reading and writing across the curriculum.

May I recommend the website 'PhonicsPlay' if you would like to practise your phonics at home? The website has lots of free games and printable resources, as well as a subscriber area too. Click on the image below if you would like to visit the site!

Maths

Ms Challenor will teach Year 1 Maths each day. We will be focussing on money (making amounts and giving change), knowledge of bonds to 20, understanding the inverse relationship between addition and subtraction and starting to develop our understanding of multiplication.

Our Maths lessons will be very hands on. Children will work with a wide range of concrete apparatus (such as cubes, counters, abacuses, Numicon, Base 10 equipment, buttons, shells, bundles of wooden sticks in tens, etc).

As they gain in skill and knowledge, children increasingly learn to use pictorial representations of mathematical concepts, including number lines, hundred-squares and the part-part-whole model. Finally, they will begin to learn other written methods. As well as number skills, we will also be developing our knowledge of geometry and ways of measuring length, time, capacity, volume and mass.

Reading

We LOVE reading in Year 1! Children should keep practising every day so that they become more and more fluent at word recognition. We know it can be really tricky for young children at first, but the more they practice, the less hard it gets; nothing beats that proud feeling when it starts getting easier! It is also important the children develop their comprehension skills and can understand and respond to the texts that they read.

Science

Our area of study this term in Science is 'Everyday Materials and their Properties'. This exciting topic will cover identifying a range of materials and the objects we can make from them, sorting objects by their properties and reasoning why materials are suitable for different purposes. This area of science will give us many opportunities (linked to our 'Space Race' topic) to carry out experiments, carefully observe what happens, record our results and answer scientific questions.