KS1 – Newsletter – 17.1.25

Hopefully you have all found it a bit easier to get to school this week and the children have certainly been up for learning!

Samuel Pepys’ diary has been our focus in English this week. Year One listened to a simple extract and put pictures in order before writing sentences attached to them. Year Two were focusing on past and present tenses and changing words from the present tense into past tense. We all watched some videos about Samuel Pepys story and wrote facts about him that we could remember. We also wrote a descriptive piece as though we were Samuel Pepys looking out of the window and watching the fire. Year One’s phonic focus for this week has been /ew/ for stew. Year Two’s phonic focus this week has been /ure/ for future.

Year One have begun to learn about subtraction. They have learnt the different terms associated with subtraction eg minus, take away, less. They have looked at how when we subtract, we always take away from the whole. They have completed subtractions from 10 using a numberline, part whole models and bar models and have completed subtractions from simple word problems. In Year Two, one group have continued with missing number problems. They have been putting the number sentence into a bar model to help them solve it. The other group have continued with subtraction, but have now moved on to exchanging. They used lots of practical resources to help them to visualise and understand how and why they need to exchange.

Seasonal changes is our topic in Science and the children have been completing work comparing the seasons. They have looked at which months fall into each season, what the weather is like and therefore what they should wear. They also thought about what happens to the trees, plants and flowers during each season.

The weather fed into our PE lessons too. We began a unit on dance. The children were responding to the music with movements appropriate to different weathers. They were learning how to count 8 beats and put a collection of movements together.

We learnt about Greta Thunberg in Geography, and how she has been campaigning for people to take climate change seriously. We have then been looking at world maps and identifying and naming the continents. We discussed which was the biggest and smallest continent and that fact that we live in Europe.

We have begun to look at the program ‘Scratch’ in our computing lessons. This is a new program to most children and so we began to look at the basics of how to use the program. The children had the opportunity to explore the program and what it can do.

In RE, Year One recapped the story of Joseph. They thought about which characters were in the story and how they behaved. They then acted out the story taking on all the different parts. Year Two began to learn about how Jesus taught in parables (stories with a meaning). This week they learned the stories of the lost sheep and the lost coin.

PSHE for Year One, was building on their knowledge of the pants are private rule. They discussed what to do if someone made them sad. They thought about a little problem, like someone pushing in the line and how they could sort that themselves. They moved onto to thinking about what they should do if they had a big problem, especially if involved an adult and how they could talk to another trusted adult. Year Two was looking at goals they could set themselves for life. For example what job they would like, where they would like to travel to, what kind of house they would like etc… They looked at a variety of goals and after discussion ranked them from most to least important.

Diary Dates:

Watch this space!