The Grove Primary School

What a wonderful, busy first term we have had in Year One! We want to start by saying a huge well done to all our Year Ones for settling so brilliantly into their new classes.  They have loved spending time with their friends again and are learning to co-operate and work well in groups. They have also enjoyed our topic of ‘Land before time’ and it has been great to see their enthusiasm for learning.

We have enjoyed lots of dinosaur stories during our English lessons. The children have been focusing on writing good quality sentences remembering to start with a capital letter, end with a full stop and leave finger spaces between words. We are also learning to use ‘and’ to expand our sentences and make them more interesting. We loved reading our letter from Jam the T-rex and we even wrote a letter back to him!

In Art and Design, we have been learning about primary and secondary colours. We have been mixing primary colours to make secondary colours and we have been adding black and white to primary colours to alter shades and tints. We have explored the work of paleoartists and have created our own piece of artwork using these artists as inspiration. We painted a sunset background, mixing paints to create other colours and then we drew and cut out silhouettes of dinosaurs to create our final pieces.

In PSHE, we have been learning about different emotions that we feel and who we can talk to if we are sad or need help. The children were able to name lots of people they can speak to, both at home and in school. The children have been role playing different scenarios of when they are feeling happy, sad, frightened, excited, shy, embarassed, angry, etc.

In Maths, we have been securing our understanding of place value to ten. The children have been finding one more and one less than a given number and learning to use the vocabulary and symbols to represent ‘greater than’, ‘less than’ and ‘equal to’. We have made a great start to the Times Tables scheme and, again, all the practise that happens at home is so valuable.

We have been learning about physical Geography and what it means. The children walked around the school grounds identifying some physical features. They used this knowledge to create their own maps of a dinosaur island and then were able to create it from old junk, lego and objects. We loved the results!

After reading ‘Tom and the island of Dinosaurs’, we had a great Science lesson making our own volcanoes. We mixed washing up liquid, bicarbonate of soda and red food colouring together, added the vinegar and then stood back to watch the effect! It caused a great deal of excitement and scientific talking.

        We are proud of all our Year One children and we hope they all have a lovely, restful half term break. We look forward to seeing you all again for an exciting Term Two!