Year 1 w/b 15th May 2023

Date: 19th May 2023 @ 4:40pm

For Mental Awareness Week we have focused on the importance of talking about our feelings to others. Having good mental health means:

• Looking after our mind just as much as our bodies
• Finding ways to do things that make us feel better if our minds aren’t feeling so well.
• Making mental health an important part of our lives

This year the focus for mental health is ‘Anxiety’. When we are anxious, we can feel nervous, overwhelmed, scared, lonely and feel like we have butterflies in our tummies. We agreed we all worry about different things, but it was important not to keep worries to ourselves and talking about worries to a trusted adult or friend can really help. These are some of the other ways we agreed we could manage our anxiety:

• Having a good night’s sleep
• Happy breathing
• Being active and enjoying time outside
• Spending time with family and friends

We also reflected on our learning in ‘My Happy Mind’ and reminded ourselves about the fact if we want the 3 parts of our brain to work together well, we needed an attitude of gratitude, where we believe to achieve and enjoy strength spotting in ourselves and others. Finally, we read the book Ruby’s Worry by Tom Percival, which reminded us that worries like nothing more than being hidden. When we talk about and share our worries, our worries are reduced, and we can cope with them more easily.

After such a great week writing our return stories last week, we are sticking with the same text (The Secret of Black Rock) and have been looking at postcard writing. Erin, from ‘The Secret of Black Rock’ sent us a postcard and we are using this as a model to write our own postcards. This week we have been looking at language features such as alliteration, exclamation sentences, noun phrases and the use of conjunctions to join up parts of a sentence. We have answered comprehension questions about the text and looked at examples of Year One spelling patterns and rules used in the model text. We finished the week using these writing skills to write our own postcards that linked to ‘The Secret of Black Rock.’

In Maths this week we finished of our division topic by thinking about how we can share objects into different groups. We then moved onto our new unit of ‘Position and direction’. The children thought about how to turn using the term, quarter, half and full tern. We practiced using our voices to give clear instructions using the words ‘left, right, forwards, backwards, above and below. We learnt that we had to be very clear with our instructions so our friends could successfully follow them.

In Forest School this week we were really delighted to see the children using tools. We collected a variety of petals and leaves from our forest school area and used hammers to carry out an activity known as ‘hapa zoming’ to create the most beautiful pictures. The children listened carefully to the safety briefing about how to use the tools correctly and we were really pleased to see all of the children follow the rules to safely complete the activity. We were surprised to see that the leaves were even more effective than the petals at making an image.

This week was our final practical session in DT, with a partner we have produced our final piece of playground equipment. Next week we will evaluate our pieces of playground equipment against the design brief we created earlier in the half term. Again, the teamwork and creativity the children have shown as been brilliant.

Today we finished the week with a visit to the Wonderdome. Wow, what an experience! The children were in awe at what they could see in space. We looked at all of the planets, saw footage from the moon landings and discovered what is next for space travel.

Next Monday will be our seaside day in school. Please refer to the email for more details and we look forward to sharing our learning in our blog next week. Let’s hope we have some sunshine!

Next Friday we will be wishing Mis Shea well as she begins her maternity leave. We know the children and staff will miss her but we can't wait to hear about the arrival of her new baby. We want to thank her for all of her hard work with Year One and wish her all our luck and love as she begins this exciting journey

Many thanks,

The Year 1 Team