Year 1 w/b 27th September
Date: 30th Sep 2021 @ 5:22pm
Week Five in Year One has come to an end but we do hope to see some of you at church on Sunday for the Harvest Service. Many thanks to those of you who have brought in toiletries and personal hygiene products, if not there is still plenty of time next week.
This week we have come to the end of our letter writing unit in English and will move on to instruction writing next week. Some of us were able to publish our extended writing pieces and there are some on display to celebrate the hard work that has been put in so far. We have created book reviews of the text ‘Major Glad, Major Dizzy’ to display in our classroom and have also worked on core, Year One writing skills throughout the week.
In phonics we continue to review our phonics sound including the sound ‘ee’, writing words with this sounds in sentences and adding the suffixes -er and -est where appropriate. Examples of this from this week were: green, greener and greenest. Monday’s spelling homework therefore will reflect this teaching and gives the children a further opportunity to embed their learning with you at home.
Building on last weeks maths learning we have introduced the following three symbols to compare numbers and quantities: < > and =. Children are now showing their confidence and understanding when comparing values using the terms ‘greater than’, ‘less than’ and ‘equal to’. To continue to work on this at home you could give children two numbers to compare and add in the correct symbol e.g. 8 __ 7 would be 8 > 7 ‘eight is greater than seven’ or 6 __ 6 would be ‘six is equal to six’.
In our journey through the Bible, we are still exploring Genesis and this week Mrs McLean, Revd Sandi and Year 2 told us about Abraham and Sarah. God spoke to Abraham and Abraham listened travelling great distances to set up camp with his wife. God trusted Abraham and Abraham trusted God. God promised Abraham as many descendants as there are stars in the sky and amazingly Sarah found she was indeed pregnant. They named their son Isaac, meaning laughter because Isaac brought great joy to their lives. God kept his promise, and we too discussed the importance of keeping promises if we make them. Year 1 could explain to us the many promises they tried to keep and were honest enough to admit that sometimes promises were broken or sometimes forgotten. The Ethos Council also explained to us that for Harvest this year we would be supporting the work of Cheshire East, Halton and Runcorn in their endeavour to provide hygiene goods to asylum seekers. Thank you to all those parents who have already donated soap, toothpaste, toothbrushes, shampoo, and sanitizer to those less fortunate than ourselves. Could we also just remind you that it’s harvest this Sunday, and all are welcome to St Oswald’s at 10.30am for this family all age worship. Several teachers, including Mrs McLean and Mrs Wood, will be attending. Other members of staff may be celebrating harvest in their home churches.
Exploring good news further in RE helped us to understand the good news Jesus brings to all people. Jesus offered friendship, forgiveness, and peace to everyone including those on the fringe of society, the outsiders, lonely and friendless. This week we acted out the story of Jesus arriving in Jericho and meeting Zacchaeus the tax collector. We were amazed how Zacchaeus changed from his greedy and dishonest ways once he had met Jesus. Zacchaeus said sorry and made a promise to repay people 4 times the amount of money he had taken from them as he wanted to be a better person, be forgiven, and loved.
In Heart Smart this week we explored feelings and looked at emojis that showed various emotions. We too made faces to show these emotions before we discussed the triggers to these feelings. We were surprised that not all of us felt happy, sad, angry, or confused by the same things and not all of us showed how we felt in the same way. We finished our session with a great game of feeling bingo. Heartsmart means being able to describe how you are feeling and notice how others around you are feeling too.
In Science, having organised our leaves into 2 groups last week: deciduous and evergreen and having practised recalling names of trees, including oak, sycamore, rowan, beech, cherry, holly, fir, and ivy we focused specifically on our class tree, an apple tree. We watched a clip of how an apple tree changes through the seasons identifying key changes to its appearance in terms of its leaves, blossom, fruit, and foliage.
Linked to our learning in science, in forest school, Mr Simmons helped us recall tree names by looking carefully at the shape and colour of the leaves and the bark. We foraged for leaves before adding them to a strip of paper to make wonderful woodland headdresses. We also learned about the alder and the iridescent alder beetle which has nibbled many of the leaves leaving lacey skeletons of the leaves.
In History we have compared and sorted old toys from the past and not old toys from the present. We then had to consider, and explain, how we sorted them and how we knew the toys we placed in the ‘old toys’ category are in fact old toys. We came up with adjectives to describe the two sets of toys to support our decisions e.g. faded, worn, chipped.
In Dance we continue to work on our animal dance and are much more confident completing the actions in time with the music including the travel section and a freestyle section in the dance.
There have been two parts to our music this week as we have also been working on learning and performing the Harvest songs for our service next week. Our piece of piano music this week was another performance by Lang Lang called Flight of the Bumblebee. Most children could easily identify that this music was about a bee and enjoyed the tempo. Please have another listen at home if you get chance!
Thank you again for your continued support and we look forward to seeing everyone on Monday -if not before at church on Sunday.
Mrs Pulle and Mrs Lindersen
