Reading and writing 

Year 1 children have enjoyed immersing themselves into a variety of texts so far this year. They have learnt The Three Billy Goats Gruff, a poem called Pirate Pete and are now learning Little Red and the very hungry lion. The children have also enjoyed their whole class reading sessions where they have read The Jolly Postman, The Gingerbread man and are now enjoying learning more and more about animals in winter in the book Winter Sleeps: A Hibernation story. The children have been learning new skills including how to use adjectives, nouns and verbs. Ask your child to tell you what these are and keep reminding them of these word classes at home. 

Maths 

In Year 1 children have learnt about Place Value such as, sorting, counting and ordering objects and numbers. The children learnt to recognise numbers as words, compare numbers by finding out 1 more and 1 less as well as identifying less than, greater than and equal to. This term children in Year 1 learnt about Addition and Subtraction. They enjoyed learning about the part-whole model and adding numbers togethers. The children challenged themselves and learnt about fact families and subtraction by taking away and crossing out to find out how many is left. They have become confident with using the number line and have learnt to subtract numbers by creating jumps. The children are learning to become independent learners by using concrete resources such as counters and 10 frames, multilinks and number lines. 

Science 

This term in Science, children in Year 1 have been learning about Materials. The children have explored and investigated a range of different materials. These have included: Metal, wood, plastic and fabric. They have learnt about different properties of these materials and investigated how these properties can help decide what an object should be made of.  Also, they have  learnt new vocabulary such as, waterproof,  transparent and absorbent. The children have shown a keen interest and desire to learn about this topic. 

Other curriculum area which has inspired and motivated the children

The children in Birch class were very lucky last half term to have a local trip in keeping with the ‘Our Local Area’ topic. They did a local area walk where they watched the planes take off and land at Luton Airport as well as have a little play in Wigmore park. Unfortunately, we had to cancel the local area trips of Ash and Alder class due to the weather and the unexpected fire at Luton Airport. Both of these trips will be rebooked when the weather is dry. On top of this all year one children had the fantastic opportunity of visiting Pizza Express restaurant in the town centre. There they each learnt how to roll dough, stretch it out and complete the pizza with delicious toppings. We are sure you have heard from the children all about how they made themselves a margherita pizza in their fantastic hats and aprons. 

The children have enjoyed singing assemblies weekly and also class music lessons delivered by The Luton Music Service. These are invaluable sessions for the children to learn appropriate music skills. 

Over the next few weeks the sequence of learning will focus on:

• Toys from the past and how they have evolved over the years.
• The children will be learning the story ‘How to Catch a star.’
• In math, we will be focusing more on subtraction before moving on to geometry.
• We are also preparing for our Christmas concert and learning a range of festive songs.