Welcome back to our Spring Term!  It has been so lovely to welcome the children back into school and hear about their Christmas breaks!  Lots of stories to tell and memories made! We also want to take this opportunity to say a big 'thank you' for the wonderful and thoughtful gifts we have all received.  More importantly,  the kind and thoughtful messages.  It means a lot to us all. Our Autumn Term in year 1 was full of 'firsts', lots of 'light bulb' moments, inspiring conversations, questioning, some incredibly mature responses to each other and a building of the understanding that we are all unique and wonderful.  We worked hard to understand and live by the values of our school and ended the term with some incredibly proud adults around us! Term Ahead documents will soon be sent to all, providing an overview of our learning this term. Thank you for your continued support, The Year 1 team

 This afternoon, we read the story of ' The Lion inside '.  From this we discussed our whole school focus this half term of 'courage'.   Our conversation led to things that we 'can't do... yet' and also things that we can do already.  We gave some lovely, thoughtful affirmations to each other as we looked into the 'mirror', just like the little mouse in the story.

  Today we explored numbers up to 20.  First we counted, then we matched objects and amounts.  We were challenged to reason why we thought amounts, using a tens frame and manipulatives. We then learnt about estimating .  In small groups, we had to estimate the number of objects and then count them, finding the easiest way to present the manipulatives in order to count them!   After this, we used the vocabulary of ‘tens’ and ‘ones’ to understand the value of each digit in a teens number! Lots of Learning completed practically!

Yesterday in guided reading, the children were paired reading. They did really well at this.  One person is the pointer who points to the words and the other person is the reader. They then swap over. 

 Today, we were lucky enough to get a visit from Father Christmas and one of his elves!  He read us the story of 'The Night Before Christmas' and treated us to a special sweet treat each! We were very excited and very polite!

 In Science, we completed our topic of 'Animals including humans', by looking at our sense of smell.  We were able to use our past learning on our other four senses, to understand how we smell.   We covered our eyes and Mrs Brown gave us different things to smell.  We came up with some amazing new vocabulary to describe the smells such as, 'calm', 'strong', 'peaceful', 'pleasant' and 'unpleasant'.

 Understanding composition We used the rekenreks to complete the stem sentences: ______ needs ______ to make ______ We had to say the sentences to a partner and prove our thinking using the rekenreks.

 Today in maths, the children were sorting 3D shapes.  They were sorting the shapes by their size, colour and properties. It was great to see the children thinking about what 2D shapes they could see on the 3D shapes. 

 Today we explored 3D shapes.  We used our knowledge of 2D shapes to talk about edges and faces and the shape of them.  We compared them to each other and discussed whether they could stack or roll.

 Today we explored 2D shapes and spoke about their properties.  We sorted the shapes into our chosen criteria.  We chose colour, sides, corners, whether the shapes could be joined to make them bigger and we were challenged to talk about our ideas.

 Today in maths, the children were learning to sort shapes.  They were sorting the shapes by their: colour, size or properties. 

 Yesterday, the children had a visit from the SCARF workshop.  Katie who was from SCARF was teaching the children all about resilience.