What a strange week we have had in Year One! The sun has definitely shone and we have definitely melted but the children have been absolutely incredible throughout it all. They have still managed to produce some fantastic pieces of learning and we may have had a couple of ice lollies along the way to help us through! 

Thank you so much for your support and kind words over these past few days. It has not and never goes unnoticed. 

We hope you have a much cooler weekend! 

Mrs Smith and Miss D x

English

We have completed our learning about the story 'We're Going to Find a Monster' by writing our own version! The children created plans for their stories on Monday by writing short sentences about the beginning, when their adventure begins, a problem that arises and how they escape back to a normal, safe ending. 

As we wrote our stories, we thought carefully about how to make our sentences more interesting for our reader. We used adjectives, conjunctions such as 'and, but' and 'because' to extend our ideas and exciting punctuation such as question and exclamation marks. We discussed how exclamation marks can be used to demarcate exciting and interesting sentences but also sentences that are important to our story and its plot. 

We finished our sequence of lessons by editing our writing to make it even better! We focused on including capital letters, full stops, correct spellings of common exception words and ensuring our sentences made sense by using all of the words we needed and the appropriate tenses. 

Maths

This week we have introduced the children to numbers from 50 to 100! We began our week by completing a Maths challenge to see how much the children had remembered about their previous topics of Place Value but we reassured them that it is okay if they found it a little bit tricky - these are numbers we haven't really used yet in Year One! 

We revisited the world of partitioning two-digit numbers into their tens and ones, or chips and peas as we call them! The children were encouraged to choose a number from 10 - 100 and create it using base ten - tens and ones! The children then had to explain how many tens and how many ones were in their number. 

We then pushed the children on slightly to using part-whole models, which we have used in our previous topics of Place Value to 20 and 50. The children had to draw their own models by thinking about what their whole number was and what the two parts were - how many tens and how many ones did they need to make their number? 

Topic Learning

Science 

We have continued our learning about animals and humans and this week we focused on the four other animal groups after mammals: 

  • Amphibians 
  • Fish 
  • Reptiles 
  • Birds 

The children had so much prior knowledge about each group and absolutely loved looking at the pictures of examples for each one. We matched descriptive sentences to each animal group and then drew our own animals to go alongside each label. 

History

We explored the history of Hitchin train station! The children were absolutely captivated by the pictures Mrs Fox took on Sunday compared to black and white images from the 1800s! The loved learning about the similarities and differences between the past and present and found it interesting that the clerk hand wrote each individual ticket rather than processing it through a computer! 

Reminders

  • Don't forget our trip to Shepreth Wildlife Park is on Monday the 13th July! Thank you so much to all of our volunteers who are giving up their time for us and our children. We will be asking you for some more information this week so keep your eyes out for that! 
  • Learning Reviews/Parents Evening are this week on Wednesday 2nd July and Thursday 3rd July from 3.30pm-6.10pm. We can't wait for you to see your children's amazing learning!