Year 1
Welcome to our Year 1 page. You can find out about all of the exciting things we have been learning about.
This term, Year one enjoyed their Punch and Judy workshop for their 7 before 7 promise 'Culture vulture'. The children enjoyed learning about when the pier was first built and the history of Punch and Judy. The children watched a terrific show and enjoyed making their own Punch and Judy tent and puppets.
In maths, we have been learning to count in multiples of 2s, 5s and 10s. We have also learnt about fractions. We have learnt to find halves and quarters of shapes.
Summer Term
This term our topic is the 'Enchanted forest'. We started our unit by receiving a very special letter from our forest fairy. We even managed to capture the forest fairy on video! This gave us lots of inspiration to write a setting description. We learnt to use suffix -ing and looked to make our sentences more interesting by using conjunctions. Once we had written our setting description of our very own 'Enchanted Forest' we had to design and describe forest fairies or gnomes to live within it.
In Science, we have been looking at the human body. We learnt about the parts of the human body and conducted lots of research comparing our eye colour and height.
In DT, we looked at Richard Reed the creator of Innocent Smoothies. We conducted market research on what our favourite fruits and vegetables were as a class. We then designed and wrote instructions on how to make a smoothie.
We finished our 'Paws, Claws and Dinosaurs' topic with a trip to Colchester Zoo. The children got to go and see the tigers they had been writing about and walk around the dinosaur section at the zoo.
In Geography, we learnt about the countries of the United Kingdom. We explored the countries and capital cities and learnt to find them on maps. We then looked at tourism and learnt about why people would visit 'London'. We learnt about the famous landmarks and made comparisons between cities and Clacton-on-Sea.
In DT, we explored, designed and made our own bridges for the Billy Goat Gruff. The children learnt to join materials together and how different shapes make structures stronger. We learnt to identify suspension bridges, beam bridges and arch bridges.
In Science, we looked at plants. The children explored cultivated plants. The children loved exploring the plants with magnify glasses to look closely at the roots and the components that make up plants. During this unit, we looked at our own natural space and used the school forest for a lot of our learning. We enjoyed looking for wild plants and thinking about how we could improve our schools green space.
Spring term
Our topic was 'Paws, claws and Dinosaurs. We began our learning looking at the text 'The Tiger who Came to Tea'. We used lots of adjectives to describe the tiger. Once we had described the tiger from the book we moved on to writing fact files about tigers. We did lots of research and found out lots of interesting facts about tigers. We learnt about titles, sub-headings, captions and labels. We learnt lots of impressive vocabulary and used it within our fact files.
In Maths, we continued our place value units to 50. We learnt how to use tens and ones and were able to represent numbers using dienes.
In History, we looked at the life of a significant individual- Mary Anning. Mary Anning was a palaeontologist and discovered the Ichthyosaurus. We learnt about the life of Marry Anning and how she made her discoveries. The children thoroughly enjoyed this topic and enjoyed being their own fossil hunters using chisels to find their own fossils in rocks.
In English, we looked at simple sentences. We looked at sentences beginning with 'I' and 'the'. We learnt all about the structure of sentences and the components needed to make a perfect sentence. We looked at diary writing and writing all about what we did at the weekend. We looked at the story of 'Paddington Bear'. We wrote character descriptions and wrote a short narrative about when he first met the Browns.
Autumn Term
In maths, we have been learning about place value to 20, addition and subtraction and shape. We learnt to access a wide range of resources and how these can help us when we become stuck. We used part-whole models to help us with our understanding of addition and subtraction. From a part-whole model we generated fact families. During our shape unit we learnt our 2D and 3D shapes. We also went on a shape hunt round the school and could spot them in our environment.