KS1 – Newsletter – 20.9.24

Everyone has settled really well into Key Stage One now and we are enjoying the beginning of our learning journey together.

Our English lessons have again been focused around ‘Funnybones’. We have been practising handwriting, noticing which letters are ascenders and descenders. We began to do some guided writing, thinking about writing a story of where our skeleton characters might go and what they might do. They created their own word banks, thinking about key words they might need and struggle to spell.

Year Two parents, your child will now have come home with a total of 3 lists of spellings from the last 3 weeks. They will receive a new list each week. There will then be a test of these spellings every 2/3 weeks including 10 words from any of the 2/3 lists they have received. This helps to see if the children are able to not only learn the spellings, but retain them for a length of time.

Forest school was linked with our English this week. We read the ‘Funnybones at the petshop’ .Having acted out the story around the firepit, the children found sticks and natural objects around the field, to create their own skeleton animals.

In Maths this week, Year One have been practising counting and looking at the 1,2,3,4…. Pattern that recurs through our number system. They have been writing numbers that follow this pattern and filling in numbers on number tracks. Year Two have been using their place value knowledge to order two digit numbers. They have been placing them on a numberline and have also been estimating where numbers would fit on the numberline.

We have been doing some categorising in Science. We looked at a whole variety of fruits. We discussed different ways of categorising them for example colours, size, ones that we peel, ones with big stones in etc… We moved the fruits into the different categories. We then explored what happens when we use venn diagrams. We used categories like fruits that are red and fruits that are berries and noticed how some fruits fall into both categories like strawberries and raspberries.

We have been comparing England with Jamaica in Geography. We looked at some of the fundamental differences like the weather and the type of beaches. We thought about what clothes people wear in each country and how this is affected by the weather.

One of our major roles in school is keeping children safe. We recognised at this point in time, being safe on line is one of the most important things we need to teach the children about. We thought about how they could access the internet – through phones, tablets, computers, games consoles etc.. and also thought about the different apps they might use or see others using, like youtube, TikTok, Facebook, Roblox….

In RE, Year One have been looking at The Bible. They learnt that this is the holy book for Christians. They looked at a variety of different Bibles, ones for adults and one for children and noticing the differences. Year Two have been looking at some of the fundamentals of the Christian faith. They have looked more in depth at what is in the Bible, they have learned the Christian symbols and the fact that Christians go to church.

In PSHE, Year One were looking at what makes them unique. They thought about the fact that we are all special in our own ways and the things we do and enjoy make us a star! Year Two have been thinking about what it means to be kind. They have discussed a whole variety of ways to show little acts of kindness to brighten peoples day, like smiling, drawing a picture, making a card etc…

Next week is week 1:

PE:

Friday for everybody

Forest schools:

Tuesday for everybody

Diary Dates:

Keep an eye on the newsletter for key dates you will need to be aware of. They will always appear here at the bottom of the page.