Year 1 McCann
Welcome to our class page!
We are enjoying a busy Summer term in Year 1. Every day we are working hard to achieve and challenge ourselves further!
Alphin's Generous Donation to the Nepal Appeal
Alphin Cyril from Year 1M has made all of his classmates and teachers proud after making a very generous donation to our Nepal fund. In class a few weeks earlier, Alphin mentioned that he had been saving up money (for almost 3 years!!) in his money bank and was deciding what to spend it on. He told the class that he didn't want to spend it on himself because he already has nice things, but instead he would like to give it to children who have more difficult lives. The next thing we knew Alphin was at the school office with his money bank! He had decided to give the full contents, an impressive £26.42 to our school fundraiser for Nepal. Needless to say, he is an outstanding member of our school community and we our all extremely proud of his thoughtful and generous actions! Well done Alphin!
Religious Education
Every day we work hard to live our mission statement:
We welcome people into our class and welcome new friends to join us in the playground. We understand that all people are welcome in the family of God.
Throughout the day, we dedicate time to pray and grow closer to God and to thank him for the many blessings in our lives. We use Pope Francis’ hand of prayer to guide us in what we pray for, as it reminds us of what is really important by praying for those in need before ourselves.
At all times, we try to look after the welfare of others and show this in our kind words and kind actions. We represent this through our special ‘Bucket filling’ display. This interactive display symbolises the kind words and interactions between members of our class and how these are a source of happiness.
Everyday, we become more familiar with the Word of God and the teachings of Jesus. People who visit our class will know that we are followers of Jesus because we are witnesses of a loving God and this is at the heart of all we do.
On a recent visit to church we were able to ask Father David lots of questions about Baptism. We also took a special journey around God's house to find out more about special places in the church. In the chapel we took time to reflect and share some Lenten prayers together.
English
In English, we have produced outstanding work as a result of studying our class novel ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’.
We began by sequencing and acting out story events in our ‘Storytellers Cottage’. We placed ourselves inside the story to help us imagine the feelings and responses of the different characters. Not only did we re-tell the story in our own words, we also wrote conversations between characters, letters from mum and Jack, and diary entries from the day the enormous beanstalk appeared!
At all times we have been working hard to secure our sentence structure, including extending our sentences using some conjunctions, all the while taking lots of care with our punctuation and spelling! We have even shown great improvement with our handwriting and are almost ready to begin joining our letters!
We are excited to begin work on our new class novel ‘The Tiger Child’ as part of our India topic. Watch this space!
Mathematics
With hard work every day, we are always improving our mental recall and enjoy being challenged to perform some Mathematical gymnastics! This is when we answer a range of quick-fire mental maths puzzles with speed and accuracy, moving fluently between different concepts.
We have worked hard to understand addition and subtraction and use our knowledge to problem solve in different contexts. We particularly enjoyed exploring simple block charts and discovered that we knew a lot about them!
During the year we have gained confidence sequencing the seasons, months of the year and days of the week and investigating units of time including an hour, a minute and a second. Then it was time to start telling the time! So far we have had great success reading and representing o’clock and half past times.
We are currently exploring, representing and recording multiplication and division and will be looking for a variety of opportunities to apply our understanding in real life contexts!
Science
Our recent science work has focused on plants! We have learnt all about the main parts of a plant and what each part is for. We particularly enjoyed discovering which parts of plants we eat!
We then received a special delivery in the post – our own packet of beans! We believe they may have been sent from Jack and so may be magic beans! We decided to plant them and care for them, whilst keeping a special plant diary to record changes. We must be doing a good job as so far our plants have roots, a stem and leaves! Fingers crossed there will be some beans growing on them very soon!
Art Workshop
In year 1 we have recently been visited by a real artist! With his help we explored different techniques for drawing and then focused on drawing figures, including drawing Jack and the giant from our class novel. Artist Paul taught us about proportion, shading and how to include interesting details.
On day two we began working in 3D, producing fantastic models of our characters using model magic! We were so inspired we have even made our own play dough models in our creative area.
Celebrating World Book Day
