Year 1 Newsletter January 2020

We have had a lovely start to 2020 in Year 1. We began the first week back looking at New Year and resolutions. We each created a time capsule. We measured each other with string, wrote what we would like to be when we are older and came up with something that we want to work hard at during the rest of Year 1. We will open these at the end of the year to see if anything has changed. We also created New Year wishing wands in our craft area.

 

We then moved onto the Old Wales New Year traditions. We created a Perllan in the forest out of apples, sticks and cloves. We enjoyed painting Welsh flags and lots of these are now displayed on our Welsh board.

 

At the moment, we are enjoying learning about Chinese New Year. We have loved learning about the story and playing in our role play area which is a Chinese restaurant. We have thought carefully about the story and the different characters. We have used adjectives in our writing to describe the characters from the story. We have thought about some P4C questions like “Does winning always make you happy?” We have begun an investigation into how to create the best raft for the animals in the story. We have looked at different materials and have observed whether they sink or float in preparation for designing our own rafts.

 

Our values for this month have been Love and Appreciation. We read the story of Saint Dwynwen (the Welsh Saint of Love) and thought about what it teaches us. We considered what things we are thankful for or appreciate during our forest session.

 

We have been consolidating our number bonds to 10 and 20. We have transferred these skills to help us understand addition and subtraction. We have used different strategies to solve number problems like estimating and checking, counting back on a number line and using Numicon.

 

We are continuing to work hard at Letters and Sounds and our high frequency words to develop our reading and writing further. We love playing ‘Word Bingo’ on ictgames.com. Lots of us have been learning Welsh sounds too and practising reading stories in Welsh.

 

We have started Kerbcraft this half-term and have learnt lots of rules about how to keep safe outdoors and when crossing roads. We have learnt a fun new song to help us remember what is important.

 

During our PE sessions, we have been creating our own Chinese New Year dances. We have thought of moves to represent the celebration. We are looking forward to performing and evaluating these dances on the last week of this half term.