Welcome to Kingfishers (Year 1)

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Mrs Purcell teaches the Kingfishers on a Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday.

Welcome to the Kingfishers’ Class page.  

The children have made a fantastic start back at school and we have been busy in class starting all our new units of work.   

This half term in English, we will be focusing on the story of ‘Dogger’ and the adventures of Paddington Bear. We will be thinking about how to use full stops, capital letters and finger spaces. We will be rehearsing our letter formation and getting used to writing in simple sentences. Whilst looking at the story of Dogger, we will be thinking about what we need to do to write a story and then writing our own stories about lost toys. Paddington Bear is going to help us think about recounts and then write our own recount about events happening around school.  

Within phonics, we will be revising our phase 2 sounds taught last year and these phase 3 sounds: ee, ai, oi, oa, ar, or, ur, ow, igh, ear, air, ure.  We will use our sounds in reading and spelling words with four or more sounds, within our phase 4 learning, as well as beginning to learn some alternative phase 5 digraph sounds.  We will also be learning these tricky words: he, she, me, we, be, you, her, my, they, all, are, was. Some of us will be moving onto the phase 4 tricky words: said, one, little, have, like, so, do, come, some, there, were, what. When reading our books that are sent home, we should start to recognise these words by sight rather than sounding out each individual letter sound.  

During our maths work this half term, we will have a large focus on place value and number recognition. We will be thinking about numbers from 0 to 20; how to write them in numbers and words, what is one more and one less and how to complete simple calculations with addition and subtraction. We will be playing a lot of mathematical games to help us with our problem solving and consolidating our learning within lessons. Perhaps you might like to think about what numbers you can find around the house and if you can find one more or one less!  

Within our IPC units, we will be learning about types of transport and countries around the world. In science, we will be learning about how planes fly and then designing our own paper plane. Next, we will think about boats and investigating the best hull shape to make a boat travel across water. We will be thinking about what scientific questions we could ask and how we can begin to test our ideas. 

Within geography, we will be thinking about our local area and what transport we see on a day-to-day basis. We will conduct field studies, tally chart and graphs to display our findings. We will be looking at maps of our local area and plotting routes that we walk whilst looking at signs and symbols on the map. 

During art, we will be thinking about modern paintings and how they convey speed and transport. We will look at artwork such as; Dynamism of a Cyclist, by Umberto Boccioni, 1913 and Speed of a Motorcycle, by Giacomo Balla, 1913. We will take these ideas to help us create our own transport paintings, focusing on colour blending and brush control. 

During our DT lessons, we will be exploring how different types of transport work and designing our own moving vehicle. We will explore different types of materials that our vehicle could be made from and then using a range of tools to create our final design. We will put our vehicles to the test and consider how they could be improved.  In our music lessons, we will explore pulse and rhythm by moving our bodies to the beat, clapping and using instruments.  We are using a lively song called Hey You, which has a distinctive beat, and we will perform this with our peers.  

During PE, we will follow instructions in learning simple games, and develop our skills in ball control and teamworking.  We will use control, strength and balance in gymnastics, learning a variety of balances.  We will put these shapes into simple routines and perform these, working with a partner. During our RE unit of work, we will learn about what different people believe about who God is. We will be learning about Christianity and Islam in particular.