This half term we have been doing a ‘slow write’ for our early bird activity in the morning. The children are shown a picture on the board and have around 20 minutes to write at least one sentence about the picture. They are really good at writing an M sentence which includes a ‘who’, a ‘verb’ and a ’what’ but lots of children can now also add a ‘when’ or ‘where’ onto the beginning or end of their sentence or make an M+M sentence by adding the word ‘and’.

This week, as advent has begun, we started our book advent calendar. Last month the children all brought a wrapped book into school. We have numbered the books so that on each day during advent we can open and share the book with the rest of the class. That day they also get to open our chocolate advent calendar as well!

This week in Art we have been using clay. We used our hands and some tools to explore how to make different textures and patterns on the clay, focussing on the process and not the end product. Once we were done we could scrunch it back up and start again or let someone else have a turn.

On Thursday we enjoyed a visit to our local Moor Allerton library. After a chilly walk down the hill we were greeted by the librarian who told us all about how we can join the library, borrow books for free and also information like how many books we can borrow and how long for. After she read us a funny story about a witch who wanted to turn her cat black but instead ended up turning everything colourful. We got some time to look at different books and then as a class we decided on 5 books to borrow to take back to school with us. If you aren’t a member of the library yet, do pop in to join. It is easy to sign up and best of all it costs nothing! Also a big thank you to the parents who helped with our visit!

As part of our work on instruction writing, today we have made some vegetable soup. The children helped to cut the vegetables including carrots, celery and onions, then added tinned tomatoes, seasoning and stock. A group of children took the pan to the cafe to cook the soup and then used a hand blender to blend the soup. At snack time we all had a try of the soup, some children didn’t like it but there were some who had second helpings. Next week the children will plan and write their own instructions on how to make vegetable soup remembering to use time connectives, bossy verbs and hopefully even some adverbs.

This week has been Anti Bullying week and the children have been thinking about what bullying is and what we can do to help stop it happening. As well as learning a stop bullying rap the children took part in odd sock day on Tuesday. All the children wore odd socks to show our individuality, celebrate our uniqueness and remind the children that we respect everyone in our diverse school community.

Remembrance Day

On Monday in collective worship we had a Remembrance service to remember the service and sacrifice of those that have served in the nation’s defence. In preparation the children each made their own poppy then we made it into a poppy field to lay with the other classes during the service. This linked with the value that we are thinking about at the minute which is peace.

This week in our Talk for Writing, we have started to learn about how to write instructions. We started by making some marmalade sandwiches and ate them for our snack. After that we have written some instructions together using pictures and actions to retell them before we start to have a go at writing our own next week. Take a look at the video and let us know what you think of our instructions. Could you use them to make your own marmalade sandwich?

This week in Art the children did some observational drawings of a fish. They did a great job at carefully looking at the different shapes and texture such as their scales and gills to then draw the fish in their sketch books.

Composting

In 1BN we decided that rather than throwing our snack rubbish such as banana peel or apple cores into the bin, we should be adding them to the school compost heap so Mrs Barnett bought some special composting bags and George is now our composting monitor. He has done a great job this week not only making sure that 1BN are composting all their food waste but also going to the other year 1 classes to collect theirs as well. Well done George!

This week for one of our provision challenges we have been continuing to practice using the greater than, less than and equals to signs. The children used Numicon to complete the challenge then took a photo using the ipad to show they had completed it. As you can see George could tell me that 1 is less than 3, 10 is greater than 8 and 6 is equal to 6.

We also made the most a sunny day this week and got outside to do some of our Maths work. We used practical resources such as dice, number lines and chalk to make number tracks, find one more and one less and numbers that are greater than and fewer than another number. What a great, hands on way to help with our learning and a great way you could try some Maths at home too!

We were very excited in 1BN to welcome a very special visitor, Olive. Olive is Mrs Barnett’s new puppy and she is a Labrador. The children all did a great job of being caring and gentle with Olive and we hope that she visits again soon.

We have had a really challenging week in Maths learning about less than, greater than and equal to. The children are really good at saying if one number is greater than or less than another number but have found remembering the < and > symbols a bit trickier though.

This week we have continued to learn the story of Handa’s Surprise, using actions and a story map to help us. Take a look at our video, we think the children have done a great job!