Star of the Week!

I had such a difficult decision to choose the Stars of the week this week as all of the children in Year 1 have been fantastic! After lots of discussion with Mrs Denny and Mrs Heaps we chose Cameron and Miah.
Cameron has been very helpful at tidy up time this week and all of the adults including our visitor, Mrs Griffiths, have noticed that this week.
Miah has settled into her new class and school this week so well that I keep forgetting that she hasn't always been with us!
Well done Cameron and Miah!

Miss Smith

Welcome to Year 1 - September 2014

Hello and welcome to Year 1! Mrs Denny, Mrs Heaps and I have really enjoyed getting to know the new Year 1 class this week!
The children have really enjoyed exploring the new classroom; especially playing in the building site role-play area and watching the real builders work in the playground!
This week we have been busy writing about ourselves and painting self-portraits; have a look at the display in our classroom and see if you can spot any familiar faces!

Miss Smith

Year 1's holiday!

Earlier in the year, Year 1 went away on a safari themed holiday! Here are a few photographs from our very busy two days: 

We used this rope to play a monkey game; can you remember how? 

These Lilly pads were the only way to get across the infested swamp! 

How did we get the ball onto the other post without touching it and only using the ropes? 

 

We walked to the very top of his hill, can you remember its name? 

We built lots of dens in the woods incase we got lost on our woodland safari and needed shelter. 

We visited a farm and learnt all about how the cows are milked so we can their milk. Can you remember what the baby cows are called? 

What was your favourite part of our holiday? 

Dear Zoo!

We have been reading a new book called 'Dear Zoo' by Rod Campbell. In the beginning, the person who is telling the story writes to the zoo to ask for a pet. We wrote our own letters to the zoo asking for a pet; we had to explain which pet we would like and how we were going to take care of it! We also talked about whether it would be sensible for us to have all animals as a pet and we know that all animals need special care. We looked after our school pet Milton and took it in turns each day to feed him, give him clean water and clean his house. A lady from the Blue Cross also came in to talk to us about looking after pets.

We made some predictions about the pets that the zoo could possibly send and we wrote some descriptive sentences to go with our pictures:

We read the rest of the story and found that some of our predictions were right! We painted big pictures of the animals and turned our classroom in a zoo: 

We thought of lots of describing words for the animals. We tried to think about their colour, size and personalities. We used these describing to make the sentences in the story more interesting: 

Did we do a good job? 

Miss Smith decided that we needed to go to the zoo so that we could find out about these animals! Before we went on our visit we worked in groups to make a list of the animal that we wanted to see and then we planned a route around the zoo to make sure we saw everything on our list and didn't get lost! 

When we got back from our visit to the zoo we used the information that we found out to write information texts about the animals in the story. We used Microsoft Office to type our work. 

Stick Man

We made a very strange discovery when we tried to go out to play; we couldn't get out of the door as something was blocking it! 

One of the children managed to squeeze through and found a box. 

Inside the box there was a Stick man!! 

We thought about why the Stick man might be outside our door and went outside to look for clues.

Is this a clue? Some children thought it might be part of stick man or a member of his family.

Is this where Stick man lives? 

We made posters to let people know what we had found. We described what the stick man looked like and where we found him.

The children noticed that the stickman looked sad and made predictions why this could be;

 "He is sad because his is missing his family."

"He is worried because he is lost."

"He is sad because he's having a bad hair day."

We hope we can find out why! 

Miss Smith found this story called 'Stick man' written by Julia Donaldson. We started to read the story and discovered that Stickman had lots of different uses in the story. We made some predictions about what he could be used for:

Christmas tree decorations, snowman arms, a campfire, a basket, a headband.

We spotted that there were lots of repeating patterns in the story and we added the repeating patterns to our predictions: 

'Stick man, oh stick man beware of the footballer!' 

'Stick man, oh stick man beware of the children!'

'Stick man, oh stick man beware of the boys!'

'Stick man, oh stick man beware of the big girls!' 

We worked together as a class to write our own version of the Stick man story before we wrote our own using the repeating patterns that we had spotted. We tried really hard to use words that make our writing more interesting; can you spot them? 

We went on a trip to Delamere Forest to follow the stick man trail through the deep dark woods! It was a very cold day and we walked such a long way but we were kept busy spotting stick men and reading poems as we walked through the forest. On the way back to the coach we collected fallen twigs and branches to take back to school to make our own Stick men.

Investigating magnets

In Science this week we have been investigating the properties of materials. Miss Smith introduced us to magnets and we were very excited to explore the classroom to see which materials the magnets would be attracted to. We learnt that if a magnet is attracted to a material then we say the material is magnetic. 

The magnets were attracted to the dolly tub...

and the blade of the scissors...

and the old-fashioned shoes...

and the cupboard door handles.

We found out that the magnets were only attracted to the material metal.

In our next science lesson we are going to investigate if all metals are magnetic! 

Measuring

This week we have been learning all about length. We started comparing items to find the longest and the shortest from two and three objects.

We then looked at using different units to measure things with. We did lots of measuring using paper clips, counters, pencils and pens to see how long things were.

Miss Smith asked us a tricky question: Who is the tallest person in the class?

After lots of discussion we decided to measure everyone. We drew around our bodies (we thought this was very funny!) and then measured how tall we were in lollipop sticks. We thought about using counters but decided it was would take too long and that we might loose count after a while.

After we measured ourselves we ordered the number of lollipop sticks from smallest to largest. The shortest person was 9 lollipop sticks tall and the tallest person was 11 lollipop sticks tall. Can you remember who these children were? 

 

Here is a picture of one of our outlines being measured.

When we learn about measuring later in the year will we be learning about centimetres and metres.