Welcome to Year 1!
We hope you enjoy looking at our class page. This is where you will find all of the useful details about the year including curriculum information, important dates, and a diary of our learning.
Meet the team
Miss Westhead (Class Teacher)
Mrs Klawitter (Class Teaching Assistant)
Mrs Power( Class Teaching Assistant and 1:1)
PE Days
Mondays and Tuesdays. Please wear PE kits to school and make sure all PE hoodies are labelled with your child's name.
Equipment
Not required in Year 1. All equipment for their learning in provided in school.
Reading/Homework
Reading books will be changed on a Monday.
Please ensure you are reading with your child at least 3-5 times a week. This should be recorded in their yellow reading records.
Homework is due on a Wednesday.
Spelling tests are carried out on a Friday.
Termly Enquiry
Term 1- Enquiry 1-What do artists do?
Enquiry 2- How does St Mary's change in Autumn?
Enquiry 3- (We will only begin this)Where is my school?
Term 2- Enquiry 1- (continue) Where is my school?
Term 3- Enquiry 1- How does St Mary's change in Winter.
Enquiry 2- What could my hat be made of? Scientist/Engineer
Term 4- Enquiry 1- Who helps who?
Enquiry 2- How do we move around?
Enquiry 3-How does St Mary's change in Spring?
Term 5- Enquiry 1- What Am I?
Enquiry 2- What Grows near Me?
Term 6- Enquiry 1- How does St Mary's change in Summer?
Enquiry 2- How can we play in different ways?
Our Class Blog - 2024-2025
Thursday 30th January 2025
Today we were engineers! We were learning all about joins and how we can join materials together, To do this, Miss Westhead got us to make spiders and we had to use a different type of join to join each leg to the spider's body. We used glue, tape, string, an L bend fold, treasury tags, staples... It was great fun and we were really enjoying this challenge to help us make our hats in our next lesson,
Monday 27th January 2025
We have been doing lots of writing based on the book 'Leaf' by Sandra Dieckmann, but today we learnt all about fiction and non-fiction books to help us with some non-fiction writing we are going to do. We were so good at recognising which book is fiction and non-fiction, and explaining why.
Wednesday 22nd January
To begin our new enquiry 'What is my hat made from?' we had a hat party to learn about the different materials hats can be made with and why. We had swimming hats made of rubber, hard hats made of plastic, winter hats made of wool and even a hat made of plants!
We then discussed why different hats are made- Swimmers need a rubber hat to keep their hair dry and to stay streamline. Engineers need a hard hat to stop dangerous things falling on their head, we need warm wool hats to keep us warm in the cold winter days.
We enjoyed dancing, showing off our hats and learning about they materials are hats are made of!
Honouring Mary
As part of our RE learning, we have been learning how special Mary is. We then learnt how she is honoured all over the world, and how people go on a Pilgrimage in Lourdes to honour Mary. We did our own mini pilgrimage to our statue of Mary in school. We decorated candels and flowers and brought them down to honour Mary. We then said the Hail Mary and made our own silent prayers for Mary to take to Jesus.
TOY DETECTIVES!
As part of our enquiry- Where is our School? We had to understand what a map is. We then created a map of our classroom. We then hid toys around the classroom and toy detectives had to come back into the classroom and use the map to see where we had drawn a X to show where the toy was hidden. It was great fun and we were very good at using the map to locate the toy.
What is a Map? - Geographer
Our big question in our enquiry this term is 'Where is My School?'. In today's lesson, we had to understand and use a map to walk around Bradley Stoke.
At the beginning of this enquiry, we recieved a VERY important letter from Santa! He wrote in his letter that he knows where all our houses are, but he actually doesn't know where our school is! He asked us to find out and write him a letter back to him with our address on. So, to learn more about where our school is, we followed a map around Bradley Stoke. We also found a letter box to post a letter back to Santa!
Poetry week.
The past 2 weeks we have been focusing on poems! We firstly learnt about reciting and performing acrostic poems, we then performed our poems to year 3, which was so fun! We thought carefully about our actions and changing our voices too. We then have been writing our own acrostic poems. First, we had to go outside and use our senses to create a good vocabulary bank to use in our own poems.
Maths- Part Whole models
In maths we have been working hard on understanding Part Whole models. We have been using them to help us add, write fact families and also to find a missing part.
Tuesday 10th September
To help us answer our next objective in RE 'I know everything comes from God', we went on a 'Wonder walk' to find beautiful parts of God's creation in our school.
Friday 6th September 2024
Our focus in RE this term is 'Creation'. Our first objective to understand was 'To know the story of how God made the World'. We thought about many wonders we had about His world, such as, 'Why did God make Rainbows' and 'Why did God make Giraffes tall'. We then used Godly play to explore some of his wonderful things he created.
Wednesday 4th September 2024
Our first day in Year 1! We listened to the book 'The Fish who Wished'. We then thought about our own wishes for year 1. We then used special wishing wands to blow bubbles and try and make our wishes come true!
Our Class Blog - 2023-2024
Friday 14th June 2024
Our current enquiry question is 'How does St Mary's change in summer?'. We have already gone out and looked at signs of summer and done an artist study on the artist Gaudi. In this lesson we learnt all about shades and patterns needed to replicate mosaics in the style of Gaudi. To help us understand that there isn't just one colour green, we went on a colour shade hunt, matching objects in nature to the colour shade on our 'colour thesaurus'. We really enjoyed this and luckily the weather was kind to us- As it should be in June!
What is a mosaic?
We are learning all about mosaics, especially Gaudi's! We kept thinking mosaics were a painting so Miss Westhead took outside to see St Mary's very own mosaic!
Poetry week.
This week we have had a poetry week, learning all about poems! It has been so much fun. We then shared our poem we had learnt with Year 6, thinking carefully about expression. Towards the end of the week we then learnt all about KENNINGS.. We then wrote our own kennings and shared them with year 3 and they had to guess what animal our poem was about. We had to use all our learning from our enquiry to help think of good clues.
Friday 25th May 2024- How can I use clay to represent the features of mammals?
We used the techniques learnt in our previous lesson to sculpt a hedgehog. We took our time, thought about the shapes needed and the techniques needed to achieve the look we wanted for our hedgehogs. Here are the finished sculptures.
Tuesday 21st May 2024- How can I manipulate clay?
To help us with our challenge- To sculpt a mammal out of clay, we learnt all about what clay is and how we can manipulate it to achieve certain effects. We rolled, pinched, scratched, pulled and smoothed. We now have some great skills and techniques for when we make our clay hedghog next lesson.
Friday 10th May- What are the 5 senses?
We have been learning all about our body parts and our 5 senses. We did a fun investigation where we had to test these 5 senses. 1- We had a touchy feely bag and had to guess the object and describe how it felt on our skin. 2- We had another secret bag, this time with noisy objects. We had to guess the object and describe the sounds, 3- Sight, we had to describe things we could see using good adjectives. 4- We had a range of nice (and not so nice!) smelling items, We had to describe the smells. 5- Finally, we had to test our sense of taste. We were blindfolded and had to guess to food and describe the taste and texture. It was GREAT fun!
Monday 29th April-Grouping animals by what they look like.
For our enquiry topic- 'What am I?' We had to look at how we could group animals. We looked carefully at the characteristics of animals and grouped them by this.
Measuring the MASS or objects and the VOLUME and CAPACITY.
In the final 2 weeks of spring term, we have been learning all about measurement. We all started off with measuring the mass of objects using balancing scales, We were very good at this! We then learnt about volume and capacity. It is tricky to know the difference between volume and capacity, but we are doing really well.
Tuesday 5th March
We learnt about what the word Repent means. We did a fun activity to help us with this. We made a stain on some white cloth using raspberries. This stain symbolised a mistake we make (a sin). We then tried to fix this mistake, make a change, turn back to God and make the right choice- we repented. We cleaned the cloth with water to symbolise this. We then needed God’s forgiveness. We used lemon to represent this and to take away the final stain.
Wednesday 28th February 2024
Father Eugene kindly came into our class to teach us all about Ash Wednesday. He brought in some ashes, a palm leaf and a palm cross and told us all about the meaning of them. It was really interesting and we learnt so much- Thank you Father Eugene!
Monday 26th February 2024- Fairy Tale WOW day!
In Year 1 we had a FABULOUS day celebrating all things FAIRY-TALE! We all dressed up to begin out new topic 'Traditional tales'. We had to predict what had happened to the mess in the classroom when we came into class, write a Wanted! Poster to find the Big, Bad Wolf, follow clues to find the key features of a fairy tale AND WE SAW THE BIG BAD WOLF!!! We also made Rice Krispie Marshmallow wands and so much more... What a fun way to start our new topic!
Thursday 30th November
Our class saint is St Nicholas. We are lucky to have such a festive saint. We had our Class Saint Mass where we shared our learning about St Nicholas. We acted out the story of St Nicholas and sang 'Jolly Old St Nicholas' and 'When the Saints go Marching in'. Thank you Fr Eugene for coming to see our mass and sharing so many interesting facts about St Nicholas. We were amazed at how much you know about the Saints in our school
Tuesday 5th December
Some of us are rockstars and attend Rocksteady every week. They then did a concert to the school showcasing the song they've been practising in their sessions. They were magnificent performers and make a great band!
Thursday 16th November 2023
At the beginning of our next enquiry, we recieved a VERY important letter from Santa! He wrote in his letter that he knows where all our houses are, but he actually doesn't know where our school is! Our enquiry question is 'Where is our school?' He asked us to find out and write him a letter back to him with our address on. So, to learn more about where our school is, we followed a map around Bradley Stoke. We also found a letter box to post a letter back to Santa!
Tuesday 31st October 2023
To help answer our enquiry question 'What does St Mary's look like in Autumn?' we went on a walk to look at the colours of autumn. We made a leaf kebab of all the different colours and shapes of leaves in our school.
Monday 25th September
Our topic in RE has been 'Creation'. One of our objectives is to ask questions about what we wonder abouit God's Creation. We had so many questions, such as 'Why did God make penguins swim?', 'Why did God make flowers so pretty' and 'Why did God make rainbows'. We then went on a Wonder Walk to see what beautiful parts of God's creation we could find in school. We found so many special things!
Tuesday 19th September
To complete our enquiry question- Who am I? We ended with the challenge of creating a self portrait, with a picture frame filled with drawings of things that makes us who we are. Here are some pictures of us completing a first draft of a self portrait.
Name | Format | ||
---|---|---|---|
Files | |||
No data |
Thursday 7th September
To begin our science topics on 'Plants', we went on a walk around school to spot lots of different plants. We learnt that plants are not just flowers, but trees, bushes, grass... We talked about how they are all similiar and how they are all different. We then looked at some seeds in readiness for planting next lesson.
Tuesday 5th September 2023
Our first day in Year 1! We listened to the book 'The Fish who Wished'. We then thought about our own wishes for year 1. We then made special wishing wands to blow bubbles and try and make our wishes come true!
Representing numbers- December 2022
We have been busy in maths representing numbers to 20 in as many different ways that we can think of. We made some posters to show this.
Borrow the Moon Box- Thursday 8th December 2022
Miss Molloy organised an exciting box- Borrow the Moon, to come into all the classes. We had great fun looking at all the fascinating rocks and completing an investigation into making craters.
Year 1 St Nicholas Class Service - Tuesday 29th November 2022
We invited Father Eugene and our parents to come and watch a short class service all about our class saint- Saint Nicholas.
Blaise Castle Museum- Thursday 3rd November 2022
Year 1 went on an exciting trip to Blaise castle Museum. Here we learnt all about the history of toys to support our history topic- toys from the past. We had a fun workshop ran by the Blaise Museum staff, and then we did a treasure hunt to answer questions about all the wonderful toys in the museum.
Look what we did when we were in Reception-2021/2022
Monday 4th July
Ahoy me hearties! Shiver me timbers! Reception had a fantastic pirate themed day today starting off with a visit from a real pirate who told the class some gruesome pirate tales with the help of some puppets! Lots of ooh argghhs, laughs, artefacts, magic, pirate facts and sea shanties. We've made pirate maps, stole each others treasure and learnt our very own pirate names!
Friday 25th March
Today in Forest Friday we learnt all about minibeasts and their habitats before going on a bug hunt around the school grounds. Afterwards we decided to treat the minibeasts to a stay at the luxury bug hotel that we made. We hope they will leave us a 5 star review!
Monday 7th March
On Monday we had a very special visitor- Lydia the vet! She was absolutely fantastic showing the children how she looks after animals, explaining her uniform and even brought in some dogs teeth and worms to show us. Afterwards we all played in our role play area using what we had learnt to be vets ourselves.
Thursday 4th March: World Book Day
Wow, what a brilliant day we have had! All the children looked fantastic and were able to confidently talk about their favourite book. We did a book scavenger hunt, a quiz and made our own bookmarks. We learnt about what an author was and some of children had a go at writing their own books. In the afternoon we took part in a KS1 parade and had a ‘booknic’ with our buddies. A lovely, lovely day had by all!
World Faith Week- Through our learning of Hinduism this week we have been looking at and creating our own Rangoli patterns, role playing the story of Rama and Sita, painting Mehndi patterns and made our own Diva Lamps.
January 2022
Reception have been learning about this term's values: Compassionate and Loving. They thought about how they show love to each other, their friends and the world.
Friday 12th November
During our Forest Friday session, the Reception children roasted marshmallows on our very own Bonfire. Yum Yum!!
Wednesday 3rd November
Reception and Year 6 enjoyed there 'Buddy Trip' to Tynsfield National Trust Park last week. They worked together to build a den for a little creature and made their own natural dye bunting to hang in their classrooms. The year 6 children bonded with their buddies and were expectational in their role as supportive, nurturing and confidence builders. The Reception children were super excited about their first school trip and were absolute superstars!
Friday 22nd October 2021 - Harvest Festival
St George's Class have been learning about Harvest Festival.
Monday 18th October 2021 - What a great start!
St George's Class have settled into St Mary's so well! They have been very busy and you can see a snapshot of this below:-