Grange Valley Primary & Nursery School

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Welcome to Year 1 - Mrs Dolman's Class 2018-19

Summer  2   2019 

Our final Summer term in Year 1 was so much fun but went extremely quickly!

We read the fantastic story The Lighthouse Keepers Lunch and the children wrote their own versions of the story using adventurous vocabulary and varied punctuation. Later in the term we looked at shape poetry and the children wrote their own poems about nature and the environment. 

In History and Geography we learnt about seaside towns and located them on a map of the UK. We looked at the physical and human features of the towns and compared them to our town. As the seaside has been such an important part of peoples lives we looked at seaside holidays of the past and how the seaside has changed over time. 

In Art we learnt about different ways you could join materials together. We studied the technique of weaving and looked at the importance of it around the world. We designed a seat cushion by weaving felt and made a paper weaving basket.

Along with all our learning we watched the Y6 performance, enjoyed the school summer fair,  sadly said goodbye to our Year 6's in the leaving assembly and danced our feet off at the end of year disco

What a great way to end a fantastic year! I can't believe how grown up my class is now. You are 100% ready for Year 2. 

I hope everyone has a fantastic summer and I look forward to seeing you all back in school in the Autumn term. 

Summer 1 2019 

At the beginning of the term Year 1 have been learning about ‘What plants need to survive?’ Our term was made thoroughly enjoyable as we were lucky to visit to Sankey Valley with the rangers to learn all about wild plants and trees. As part of the our learning the children planted sunflowers and bean plants and observed them growing over a period. They are becoming quite the little gardeners. The children also carried out experiments to see what factors would affect the survival of the plants. We linked our Art lessons and created 3D flowers, painted pictures of gardens and flowers taking inspiration from Monet and Van Goff. The children have been on wild flower hunts and used the forest area to take bark rubbings of deciduous and evergreen trees.

Our English topic this term was 'Fantasy Stories.' We have been learning about the fantasy worlds of stories Peter Pan, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice and Aliens Love Underpants. The children have described magical objects, characters and wrote their own fantasy stories. The children's had a great focus on cursive handwriting and their phonics knowledge has greatly improved clearly showing in their spellings tests, work and phonics screening practices. We wrote our own stories after reading the lovely story Granddad's Island, about a little boy and his adventures with his Granddad. Our focus was to improve the on ambitious vocabulary in our writing.

In our Singapore Math's sessions this term we have been concentrating on multiplication, division and measure including time, money, weight and capacity. The children have carried out exploring sessions looking at counting in 2’s, 5’s and 10’s, reading o’clock and half past times and recognising coins and notes. Any skills they learn are then used to solve problems or challenges.  

In Geography we have started our new topic ' What would Travelling Ted like about our town?' The children have been learning about what physical and human features we might find in our local area. We went on a walk around the school grounds and the children were given locations to find from a map and had to tell the teachers how to get there using the map and compass. They then created maps and journey maps back in class.

In History we learnt about famous explorers including Neil Armstrong, Christopher Columbus and Robert Falcon Scott. Later in the term we had a whole school vote on the most significant British person of the past. Our class focused on Mo Farah but after lots of debating and watching the presenting of the other individuals by all classes in assemblies, it was decided that Winston Churchill was the winner! 

I can't believe we are going into our final term of Year 1! I am sure it will be another busy one. 

Mrs Dolman and Mrs Steele 

 

Spring 1 2019 

It has been another very busy half term in Year 1!

This term the children have worked incredibly hard and have been continually trying their best to strive to meet their personal targets.

In English we started the term off learning about written and verbal instructions and how to write a set of instructions. The children wrote different instructions to give to the reception children to help teach them how to wash their hands and brush their teeth correctly. The children had great fun making a bubble blower and then writing a detailed set of instructions using time adverbs, imperative verbs and conjunctions. We have read a selection of books this term including the class novel Wind in the Willows, The Queen’s Knickers which is a humous book about the important jobs the Queen has to do and the special knickers she has to wear for them. We read the story The Three Little Pigs and the True Story of the Three Little Pigs. This is the story that is written from the Wolf point of view and he explained how the story actually happened and it was very different from the three little pigs verison of events. This inspired the children to write their own versions of the story creating new animal characters and a new ending to what happened to their animals in the story after a bad character tried to destroy their homes. Later in the term we have also be concentrating on improving our phonics knowledge. We spent some time looking at split digraphs and how we can use these to write and write words with this grapheme. The children used their phonics knowledge to read words and match them to rhyming words to help us write our own rhyming poems.

We had a visit from the author Tom Palmer. The children got to ask him lots of questions about how he creates his books, comes up with the topics and why he became an author. We have followed this visit up in class with children designing the reading area to organise the books that they enjoy reading and we have continued our book and biscuits session, which the children love to relax and enjoy a good book and share it with friends. We will continue with fantastic reading into the Spring 2 term and of course with World Book Day.

In Maths the children have been exploring shapes, measures of length and height and money. We looked at naming 2d and 3d shapes and the properties of these shapes. The children completed problems solving activities and continuing patterns using the 3d shapes. Following on from this we have been learning all about money. The children recognised and ordered coins according to their value, shape, colour. We have also been using coins to make given amounts. We celebrated the whole school Money Money Money week and further developed our learning about money by adding coins together to make totals and subtracted amounts to find the change. We set up a Costa Coffee role play area up in class to practise the new skills we had learnt to buy and sell the cakes, drinks and foods. We created menus with costing. We also looked at the importance of money. The children were all given jobs in class to earn money to save in the class piggy bank. At the end of the week however much money the children had earnt allowed them to buy a present of Mrs Dolman for that value. We had various visits come into class to tell the children all about their job. We had a person from airbus, a parent that was a nurse, a sports coach, a parent who was a fireman and a talk from Willow Brook. The children were so interested to learn about their jobs and asked some fantastic questions. During this week we talked about our aspirations and how we can achieve our goals.

In our History lessons we have been learning about the Kings and the Queens of the past. The children really enjoyed learning about Richard 111 and the stories involving him and his nephews and where he has recently been found. The children created a drama to re-enact the coronation of Queen Elizabeth 11.

In PE, the children have been practising their throwing and batting skills as well as working as a team. They showed great enthusiasm in completing a sponsored exercise challenge to help raise money to help Paralympic athletes and also help our school P.E funds. It was a very challenging and tiring circuit training which the children completed to their absolute best and had great fun doing it!

The children finished off the term with a well deserved Valentines disco. We have some fantastic dancers in Year 1!

Have a great break everyone! See you all when we come back for another busy term.

Mrs Dolman and Mrs Steele

Autumn 2 2018 

Year 1 have had a fantastic half term that has been very busy but fun. Our theme for the half term has been Toys. We have explored this through Writing, Research, History and Art. For a number of weeks the children read the story of Pinocchio and produced  their own story about a puppet based on the story of Pinocchio. They enjoyed researching about puppets and writing their stories with more adventurous vocabulary and varied punctuation such as full stops, questions marks and capital letters for names, places and the pronoun I.

This half term we have had a great focus on the vocabulary the children are using in their writing and the enjoyment of reading. We introduced the 'Book and Biscuits' session every week which the children absolutely loved and we will be carrying this on next term. Children have more time in class reading for pleasure and sharing book talk. We also had our class book advent when a child a day selected a gift from under the tree for Mrs Dolman to read to the class.

In Maths, we have explored numbers to 20, place value of 2 digit numbers to 20 and addition and subtraction operations. The children are becoming more confident in problem solving and their ability to use different strategies they have learnt to solve problems .

Our History topic was about toys of the past. We had our trip to Liverpool Museum where the children attended a toys of the past session and got to play with various toys from different eras. In class we followed up the trip with more research into different types of toys and the favourite past time of puppet shows. The children made their own minion puppets by sewing together pieces of cloth, traditional tale stick puppets and monster hand puppets.

In Science, our topic was all about animals. We have learnt about the different characteristics between types of animals, what we call animals with different diets, discussed how we keep our bodies healthy and named different parts of the human body. The children used scientific enquiry, measuring and recording skills in simple investigations on senses and diets types.

Of course we can’t forget all the Christmas celebrations in class and as a whole school. The enjoyment on the children’s faces was so lovely to see on the Christmas jumper day, Christmas dinner day, Christmas fair, Christmas disco and the Christmas activities, crafts and when playing in the class role play Santa’s Grotto.

I am looking forward to another exciting term to start 2019!

Autumn 1 2018 

This first half term the children have settled into Year 1 extremely well and we have had a very busy but fun term. In English we watched the short film 'Rooted' and the children wrote their own verisions of the story, writing simple sentences and explored adventurous vocabulary to improve their writing. We read one of my favourite stories 'Whatever Next'. The children pretended to be the character and flew to the moon in role play sessions, they wrote lists of what they would take to the moon and labelled pictures of Space. The children have been trying so hard to improve their handwriting and phoncis in their writing. They are doing this by using our independent writing table in class during continous provision. 

In our Singapore Maths sessions this term we have been concentrating on numbers to 10 including writing and ordering the numbers and solving addition and subtraction problems. The children have been working together to learn new skills, discuss their opinions and solve problems together. 

In our Geography and Science sessions we have been learning about weather and the seasons. The children have been on an Autumn walk and collected and observed signs of Autumn. They then wrote counting poems and created beautiful autumnal art work. Alongside this we have been learning about weather symbols and how the weather changes across Autumn and Winter. To demonstrate all their knowledge about weather the children became weather forecasters and recorded their own weather forecasts for the class. 

In our RE sessions the children have been learning about the HIndu festival of light, Diwali. They have listened to the story of Rama and Sita and created a short role play. They have been experiementing with their drawings and sketching by creating their own Mehndi and Rangoli patterns in their sketch books.

Towards the end of the term the whole school experienced strange happenings around the school and found a large egg on the playground and had a very exciting visitor in a dinosaur cross curricular themed week. What great fun Year 1 had writing dinosaur descritpions and our own dinosaur stories, improving our dinosaur drawings in our art sessions by redrafting the drawings. We created fossils of out different materials, made playdoh dinsoaur feet and measured them to compare lengths in Maths. They even had the disgusting job of exploring dinosaur poo to investigate whether the dinosaur was a herbivore, carnivore or omnivore from what we could find in the poo! We had the highest attendance in Year 1 during this exciting week 98%! 

I am looking forward to another fun and busy half term! 

           

Year 1 2018-19
Year 1 2018-19

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