🌟 Year 1 Weekly News 🌟

This week, Strathmore has begun to celebrate Black History Month - a time for us to celebrate the different cultures, communities and stories that belong to so many. Each class learnt about a different significant figure and discussed what changes they helped to make for the future. In Year One, we introduced the children to Diane Abbott and Claudia Jones; two incredibly powerful women who worked tirelessly to change laws and strive for equal rights for all. 

📚 English

We discovered the world of list poems in English this week! We explored a variety of different poems and discussed how sometimes they can rhyme, but they don't have to. List poems are written down the page rather than across the entire line, can be about any topic and have very few rules! The children focused their poems on their favourite colours and we started to use adjectives to describe objects that are that colour. 

For example: 

Blue is
The bright sky 
Beautiful bluebells 
Sour blueberries 

The children wrote their poems using their most careful, beautiful handwriting before editing with their purple pens and illustrating. 

🔢 Maths

We have completed our learning about Place Value within 10 and continued using language such as 'greater than, less than' and 'equal to' to compare numbers. The children were able to verbalise different comparison number sentences before transferring this to their Maths Books - using the relevant symbols, the children were able to demonstrate which number was greater and which number was less than. 

We then practised ordering a set of three numbers from smallest to greatest and vice versa! The children have worked incredibly hard on the presentation of their learning this week, writing one number in each square of their Maths Book and leaving a square between each number to show where one ends and the next one begins. 

🔤 Phonics

In Phonics this week, Year 1 have been revisiting previously taught Phase 5 sounds and applying them in both reading and writing. The children have practised reading words containing multiple digraphs, improved their sentence fluency, and worked hard to recognise tricky words automatically.

They have also been challenged to tackle longer words independently, applying their phonics knowledge with increasing confidence.

Some of the words we have been reading include:

  • chimpanzee
  • starlight
  • driftwood
  • shrill
  • shrubs

Our tricky words this week have been:

  • was
  • they
  • some
  • come
  • there
  • sure
  • pure

Art 

In Art this week we continued our learning about line! After using different genres of music last week to help us draw 'what we cannot see,' this week we took our pens for a walk! The children were shown how to draw a continuous line across the entirety of their page, moving forwards, backwards, around, through and under. We then made smaller pictures out of our wider line drawing - Arlo found an elephant in Mrs Smith's drawing! The children added small pockets of colour to these particular areas of their drawings and the finished products looked absolutely stunning and so unique. 

🧵 DT

The children have absolutely blown us away this week with their incredibly sewing! Every single child was able to perform a running stitch onto their fabric to create their piece of bunting. What a huge accomplishment for our clever, resilient 5 and 6 year olds! 

Next week we will use the designs we made a few weeks ago to add the decoration and finer details to our bunting before we hang it up in our Year One corridor! 

📌 Important Information

🏃 PE Days: Monday and Wednesday

📚 Library Day: Tuesday

📖 Phonics Reading Book Exchange: Friday

Please ensure phonics books are returned on time, as late returns affect other children who are waiting to borrow them.

💛 Gentle Reminders

  • Please return phonics books in the named plastic wallet provided. This helps us keep track of books and protects them from accidental spills or damage.
  • Please ensure your child is coming to school with a coat each day as the weather is becoming very unpredictable and has been quite chilly over the past few days!  

☀️ Have a wonderful weekend and stay warm! We look forward to seeing everyone back for another exciting week of learning. ☀️