In Year 1 this year, our team is Miss Gardner, Mrs. Brookes, and Mrs. Medley. We are looking forward to a brilliant year! If your child is in Year 1 this year, please familiarise yourself with this page and we will keep you updated on the various activities that the class is currently involved in.

This year we will be teaching a wide range of subjects within the curriculum: Literacy, Maths Science, History and Geography, Art and DT, Computing, Music, RE, and French. This term 1G will have PE on a Wednesday and Thursday afternoons. Please ensure that your child brings their PE kit on these days.

Year 1 Phonics screening checks:

In June this year, your children will be tested on their phonic decoding skills in a short assessment. To help your child prepare for this, you can sound out words that you see and hear. For example: ‘c’ ‘a’ ‘t’ – cat,  ‘f’ ‘i’ ‘sh’ – fish. In the test, there are a mixture of real words and ‘alien’ words which are nonsense words.

Reading books:

Children each will have an orange ‘Flying High Reading Record’ which is taken home daily. Please help your child by listening to them read, and discussing the book by asking questions about what they have read – followed by a short comment in the reading record. In the reading record, your child can find stickers which they use to place in the comment section themselves, to show how they felt about the reading or the story itself.

Literacy

Last half term we looked at ‘Toy Story’ but this half term we are focusing on ‘The Smartest Giant in Town’ by Julia Donaldson. We have been learning how to structure our sentences and how to use adjectives, nouns, and verbs properly in a sentence. Using this knowledge, we can apply it to our writing. We are writing character descriptions for George the Giant in the story, including the character’s physical appearance as well as their personality. Also, looking at writing a retelling of the story using correct openers for sentences and time words to structure our writing. We are using innovation within our writing to change parts of the story to make it our own. As well as this, we are looking at the structure of a letter to write a letter to George the Giant developing our learning on using a question mark appropriately within our writing.

Key objectives that we are going to focus on this year are:

• Sit and hold a pencil correctly. 
• Form capital letters. 
• Form ascenders and descenders correctly, e.g. ‘y’, ‘g’. 
• Leave spaces between words. 
• Join words using connectives such as ‘and’ or ‘because’. 
• Use capital letters correctly, e.g. for I, names of people and places, days of the week and months of the year. 
• Use full stops correctly, at the end of sentences not at the end of lines. 
• Name and write all letters of the alphabet. 
• Say out loud the sentence they are about to write. 
• Re-read what they have written, checking it makes sense.

Mathematics

In power maths this term we will cover the following units:

• Addition within 20
• Subtraction within 20
• Numbers to 50
• Introducing length and height
• Introducing weight and volume

To support your child with their maths, please practice number bonds to 10 and counting in 2s, 5s, and 10s.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amxVL9KUmq8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCxvNtrcDIs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rd5DBkP9avw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lD9tjBUiXs0

Our trip to the Botanical Gardens

Year 1R and 1G visited The Birmingham Botanical Garden recently and had a fantastic time. In the morning children were able to enjoy the experience of a lesson on plants where they labeled a plant and carried out activities about pollination. After this, we had a plant hunt around the greenhouses, where children spotted cacti, colorful flowers, a water fountain and much more! After lunch, we were able to explore the outside gardens, where children saw a range of deciduous and evergreen trees. The children particularly enjoyed exploring a bamboo maze and the birdcage, with the cockatoo saying a very loud ‘Hello!’ to us as we went past. To end the day, children collected a range of leaves which they identified from a deciduous tree before throwing them in the air. Children and staff alike had a wonderful day and would like to thank the staff of The Birmingham Botanical Gardens for giving us a great experience.

Our displays