Welcome Dolphin Class,

Our big question for last term was 'Is there room on the broom for the Gruffalo?'

Miss McGrath

English

As writers we are continuing to develop our writing skills by leaving spaces between words, using capital letters and full stops so that our sentences make sense. We are using Talk for Writing to learn about journey story. We are currently using the story 'The Snail and the Whale' to help us learn about journey stories. We have started to use adjectives in our writing to ensure our writing is more interesting.  We innovated our story as a class to 'The Dolphin and the Crab'. We continued to use adjectives in our writing and then challenged ourselves to use prepositions in our writing. We also looked at postcards in English, the children wrote postcards pretending to be the crab in the story. This crab then wrote a postcard to his crab friends at home describing his journey. We have just started looking at information texts about Giraffes.

Maths

In maths we are following the 'White Rose' mastery scheme.  We have started looking at subtraction in class. We have been learning and using manipulatives to show our understanding of subtraction. We have also been learning about place value to 20. We are continuing to write, order, count forwards and backwards, find more, less and compare numbers using symbols and continuing to develop our mathematical language. We have been looking at 2D and 3D shapes. We are now able to sort both 2D and 3D shapes. We did this by sorting the shapes into colour, size, shape and sides.

Science

We have started to name and identify different animals. We have looked at grouping the different animals (mammals, fish, birds, amphibians and reptiles) and we have looked at the features of these different groups. We have also been learning to identify and name animals that are carnivores, omnivores and herbivores. We have learned the meaning of this scientific words and we have also been looking at what foods animals eat. We are also looking at food chains in science this term. We have looked at what living things need to survive and how every food chain has a producer and a consumer.

Food Technologists

We have started to look and learn about food. We have looked at the different food groups and how its important to eat each group in moderation. We planned and designed our Gruffalo crumble and we were very excited to make these! We each mixed and made our own crumble.  After that, we put the pears in our trays. Then, we carefully poured our crumble mixture onto the pears. While our crumble was in the oven, we looked back on our crumble design and picked our fruit. We then learned two different techniques to cut our fruit. These were the bridge technique and the claw technique, the children had great fun using these different techniques to cut the fruit. Once the fruit was cut the children then made their faces on the crumble. We will be evaluating our fruit crumble.

Art

We created firework pictures using paint and art straws.

We have also started to look at Axel Scheffler who is an illustrator for Julia Donaldson. We have looked at some of Julia Donaldsons books which have illustrations by Axel and we picked our favourite characters. We then drew these characters into our art books.

Our big question that we linked all of our learning to last half term was 'Can you huff and puff and blow everything down?'.

Look below to see year 1 amazing work!

Maths

As Mathematicians in Dolphins class we have been following a mastery approach using the ‘White Rose’ scheme.

We have been looking at place value within 10. We have learned to sort objects, count objects, represent objects, count, read and write forwards and backwards from 0 to 10 as well as counting one more or one less. We have also learned about one-to-one correspondence and comparing groups. When comparing groups we learned to use language such as equal to , more/greater than, less/fewer than and we introduced <, > and = symbols. We also learned about ordinal numbers and looked at the number line in greater detail. We have just started looking at and trying to understand part whole models when adding and subtracting numbers.

English

In English we have been using the text 'The Three Little Pigs'. We have been using the scheme 'Talk for Writing' to retell this story. We have created a story map of this text and used this in our lessons to help write our own version (The Three Little Chicks). We used short burst writes to write wanted posters for the wolf and we even had a visit from the wolf, where we were able to ask him questions about his behaviour towards the pigs. We are starting to look at writing instructions in year 1 and we have just given the Big Bad Wolf instructions on how to take a bath. In all of our writing, we are focusing on using capital letters, finger spaces and full stops.

We have also used drama to support our speaking skills in year 1. We have acted out the different parts of the story of 'The Three Little Pigs' as a group and performed it to the class. We have been using the Read, Write Inc programme to teach phonics. We have been using phonemes when reading a wide range of texts across all subjects and answering questions in order to extend our comprehension skills. Our class text which we have been reading is 'Winnie the Pooh' by AA Milne.

We have also been looking at instructions in year 1. We have looked at giving Mr Wolf a wash. We did this through the talk for writing scheme and we looked at the importance of time connectives when giving instructions. We used this knowledge to help us make jam sandwiches in class. We then used all of our learning to help us to write instructions for how we made our jam sandwiches. 

Science

As Scientists we have been looking at the world around us and developing our knowledge and understanding of everyday materials. We have done this by looking at the difference between an object and a material.  We have also been looking at naming the different materials that objects are made from and explaining the properties of each material and why they are used in everyday life. We have matched and sorted the materials using their properties. To help us with learning about everyday materials, we have used the story of 'The Three Little Pigs'. We Will be comapring houses built today with the materials used by the pigs.

We had a science/DT day where we used a variety of different materials to build our own houses. Our houses had to have a waterproof roof, transparent walls and an absorbent mat. The children had time to examine all the different materials they could use to build their houses before having to plan their houses.  We then conducted a series of tests on our houses. 

Geography

In geography we have looked at aerial photographs of Sunbury and located some areas that we know.  We have started looking at maps and key. We have created our own maps of the playground at Beauclerc and the children have created a key to show the main features of the playground.

Music

In music we have been following the Charanga scheme. We have been looking at the song 'Hey You' by Joanna Mangona. We have listened to this song and other styles of music each week. We have been discussing both the differences and similarities between the different songs each week. We have also been learning through the song 'Hey You' about rhythm and using percussion instruments to keep the beat.

Art

As artists we have been looking at and exploring colour mixing. We have focused on the work of Wassily Kandinsky and learned about his use of colour. We have looked at mixing primary colours and creating darker and lighter tints and shades. We have also used this new knowledge of colours to paint our own version of Kadinsky's 'Concentric Circles'.