Year One Newsletter

Welcome back to the final half term of the year in Year One. We hope that you all enjoyed your holiday and that you are ready for another busy few weeks. We can’t believe that this is the final half term of the year and we only have a few weeks left before the summer break! The year has whizzed by and we are determined to make the most of our last few weeks and finish the year in style. We look forward to seeing you at our Year One assembly on Thursday 25th June at 9.00am. The children will be bringing home any lines they have to learn and your help with this would be greatly appreciated.

Phonics and Reading

Please make sure your child has their books in school everyday, for our daily reading time. Little and often is key to good reading progress. Even a few minutes a day will make a big difference. Asking your child questions about their reading book is also invaluable and it is a good way of checking that they are understanding what they have read.

It is a busy start to the term in Year One, with the phonics screen to complete. The children have worked hard in phonics and we are proud of them all. You should have received information about this, but if you have any questions about any of this information then please get in touch, in person, via email or telephone.

Library and reading books

Birch Class change their Library books on a Tuesday and Hazel Class change their books on a Monday, so please ensure your child has their book in school if they would like to change it. It is so lovely to see the children enjoying reading books from the school library and reading for pleasure both at school and at home.

History

We have an exciting new History based topic “Who was Grace Darling?“ This is a great chance to find out more about Grace Darling and her heroic efforts in our region, including her influence on today’s RNLI.

We are very much looking forward to a visit from the RNLI, who will be talking to us about water safety.

PE

Our PE days this half term will be on a Tuesday and Friday for Hazel Class and a Tuesday and Thursday for Birch Class. We will be focusing on Fundamental Movement and Team Games: Passing a ball and using space, alongside our Athletics Skills of running, jumping and throwing. We will be making use of both the running track and the MUGA, so please ensure that your child has appropriate footwear as well as their PE kit in school.

Another date for your diary is our Year One Sports Afternoon on Wednesday 8th July. Do wear your trainers, as there will be opportunities to join in.

Maths

This half term we will continue our work on fractions, learning to recognise a quarter of a shape, object or amount. We will then be learning about position and direction; describing turns and developing our use of positional language.

We will extend our place value knowledge up to 100; partitioning number into tens and ones, finding one more and one less than numbers to 100 and comparing numbers.

We will then apply this when learning about Money; recognising coins and notes and counting coins.

We will also develop our mathematical language relating to time and learn to tell the time to the hour and half hour.

English

After lots of superb non-fiction writing last half-term, we will be focusing on fiction in Summer One. We will start by reading, ‘The Smeds and The Smoos’ by Julia Donaldson, we will then plan and write our own stories about friendship and a journey.

Phonics, handwriting and spelling continue to be a big priority and will be taught and practiced daily. In spelling we will be learning to:

• use the spelling rule for adding –s or –es as the plural marker for nouns and the third person singular marker for verbs.
• use the prefix un to change the meaning of a word.
• use the suffixes –ing, –ed, –er and –est where no change is needed in the spelling of root words [for example, helping, helped, helper, eating, quicker, quickest]

RE

In RE this term we will be learning about Judaism and making comparisons with Christianity. We will be exploring the idea that festivals are special times of worship and celebration for believers.

Science

In Science we will complete our learning on seasonal changes – exploring how spring changes to summer, the signs of summer and how we can stay safe in the sun.

We will also explore everyday materials and their properties and carry out scientific investigations – testing materials for different properties and thinking about how we can group materials by their properties.

PSHE

In PSHE we continue to talk to the children about the zones of regulation, alongside a new topic of Economic Well-being. During this topic, the children will be learning about money, banks and saving and spending money.

Design and Technology

We will be designing, making and evaluating our own puppets. Children will use templates and experiment with methods of joining materials to decorate their puppet.

Computing

Our topic in computing this half term is Programming animations. We will be building on our prior knowledge of programming Beebots in the spring term.

Music

In music lessons, we will learn to perform songs for our class assembly as well as developing our skills of listening, appraising and composing.

Thank you all for your ongoing support. As always, do not hesitate to get in touch if you have any queries or concerns.