Autumn Term 2018

Hello and welcome to the Year 1 page! We are ready to start a brand new school year, and a brand new term, after the well-deserved Summer Holiday! 

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

Bulletin Board:

• 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 Monday and Tuesday afternoons - please ensure that children have the correct kit in school. The kit is black shorts/leggings/jogging bottoms, a white t-shirt and trainers or pumps

• During 'Active Maths', which is first thing in the morning on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, children must wear pumps or trainers.

Topic and Science 

For the first half of term, our topic is 'Family and Homes'! Year 1 children will be joining the EYFS children every afternoon for our lessons, including our Topic lessons. The children will be able to explore a range of child-initiated learning experiences as well as adult-lead learning activities, centred around our topic. We are really looking forward to sharing our learning experiences with the Reception and Nursery children. In our Topic lessons, we will be enjoying a wide range of learning, including studying the changing seasons and using our D&T skills when building structures and dens. We will be creating portraits in Art lessons, as well as studing Andy Goldsworthy's amazing environmental art, created from natural materials, linking this with our learning in Science. We will be learning all about British Values through our Topic too.

English

 Ms Challenor will be teaching Year 1 children their English lessons. We will be studying a range of traditional British fairytales, such as 'Little Red Riding Hood', 'The Little Red Hen' and 'The Three Little Pigs'. These classic tales are brilliant for telling out loud, all of us joining in together! We will be learning to sequence the events in these stories, write our own versions and ask and write questions to the characters. We will also learn about non-fiction texts and the forms they can take, writing our own based upon the learning we have done in Topic lessons. 

Phonics and Spelling

 Phonics is a really important part of our Literacy learning in Year 1, and we will build our skills in both reading and writing. Children have already made a super start in Reception, 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.

Phonics and spelling across the school will be taught in small, differentiated groups, allowing for the children to focus on the outcomes of their individual phase and year group at a pace that is achievable to them. Regular 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

 Mrs Jones will be teaching Maths to Reception and Year 1, with lessons happening every day. They will be largely focussing on developing number skills, aiming to increase children's confidence working with the four operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication and division) and their mathematical symbols, as well as place value and counting skills, so that children become increasingly numerate.

In the first instance, this will largely come from children working with a wide range of concrete apparatus (such as cubes, counters, Numicon, Base 10 equipment, buttons, shells, bundles of wooden sticks in tens, etc).

As they gain in skill and knowledge, we increasingly learn to use pictorial represatations of mathematical concepts, including number lines, hundred-squares and the part-part-whole model.

As well as number skills, we will also be developing our knowledge of geometry and ways of measuring length, time, capacity, volume and mass. The children will be applying their Maths skills to problem solving on a regular basis so that they become confident using what they have learnt

We are currently learning our 2, 5 and 10 times tables. We need to know the whole operations off by heart. Please keep practising at home. Altogether, now...

"1 x 2 is 2............. 2 x 2 is 4.................. 3 x 2 is 6....!"

Reading

We LOVE reading in Year 1 (Ms Challenor is a self-confessed reading fanatic!) and the 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 easier it gets. It is also important the children develop their comprehension skills and can understand and respond to the texts that they read.

What do we need to remember to bring to school?

Please make sure you bring your PE kit (including pumps/trainers), reading book and reading record into school.