Friday 8th December

We started this week being ‘servants’ getting ‘The Big House’ ready for a Victorian Christmas. The hall was set out with ‘rooms’ from the house and in each one had lots of jobs to do! We could do the laundry, , darn socks, iron newspapers, polish the shoes, polish the silver, lay the table, shave the gentleman, serve tea, decorate the Christmas tree or make the fire.  We also could visit ‘upstairs’ where we could write Christmas cards with ink pens, make fans for the ladies of the house, play with toys, and get the children ready for bed in the nursery. When Princess Charlotte came to visit our room with the butler we had to stop work to stand and curtsey or bow to her. In the afternoon we put on our own ‘Victorian Music Hall’ performance. We practised and then performed as acrobats, singers, actors, comedians or mind readers! You can see we all had a wonderful day learning about life in Victorian times by using a wide range of artefacts and being able to imagine living in that time. Thank you very much to all the adults that came to help and to you all for providing such fantastic costumes, the children looked fantastic and had an amazing day of learning and fun. Please ask your child which activities they did and what they enjoyed the most.   We used our learning from the workshop the following day to write a recount of the events. We used time words such as first, next, after that, then, after lunch and finally to sequence the activities of the day. We also remembered to use finger spaces, capital letters, full stops, phoneme fingers to spell the words and to form our letters correctly. Finally we pretended that we were servants in the big house and wrote letters to our Mother and Father.  We asked them if they were well and then told them about all the jobs we had been doing. We also told them how tired we were! We used cold tea to stain our paper to make it look very old. We think they make a lovely Victorian Christmas display for our topic wall! This week in maths we have been continuing our learning about place value within 20. We have been comparing numbers between 11 and 19 and also ordering them. On Tuesday we compared two numbers eg 6 and 16 and had to say which number was greater.  We then had to prove it.  We said 16 is greater because ·         it comes after 6 ·         it is a two digit number ·         it has one ten and six ones ·         it is a teen number We then looked at two numbers and had to make the statements correct using the words more or less 11 is _______ than 20

9 is _______ than 12

We also learnt that you could use this symbol for more > and this symbol for less <

Ask your child if they can remember how to tell which is which.

You may like to ask your child ‘What happens if we swap the numbers around?’

We then used this knowledge to solve these problems below.

On Wednesday we had to order a range of numbers from smallest to greatest. 

Some of us found ordering numbers with images helpful whilst others of us could order a range of just numbers.

You could give your child a range of numbers to order like the ones below.

5, 0, 12

20, 17, 11, 18

2, 10, 0, 15 , 20, 12, 17, 19

At home your child may like to continue practising counting backwards and forwards from 0-20 You may like to ask your child questions like -  - True or false - 14 is greater than 12,  11 is less than 0 - My number is greater than 8 but less than 15.  What could my number be?

- My number is greater than 10 but less than 20.  What could my number be?

Today our classrooms have become busy Santa's workshops as we made movable Christmas toys. 

Thank you to all the parents who have sent in costumes for the Christmas show. Our dress rehearsal is on Monday so please bring your child's costume to school then, if you have not done so already. We are looking forward to our performances next week and can't believe it will be the last full week of term! 

We hope you have a good weekend, 
The Year One Team