Week five in Year 1 has been another exciting week and the children have been exploring a wide range of subjects and ideas.
In English this week we looked at the idea of making changes to adapt a story using the traditional tale Jack and the Beanstalk and the story maps we created in class last week. We played a lucky dip game where children pulled out a character, object and place from the story and gave suggestions of things they could be changed to. So for example instead of a Giant's castle we had a cave and instead of a Giant we had an ogre. The children shared ideas on their tables about the elements of the story that they could change and we then made a list for the working wall. We used this list and the ideas we created in our discussion to make changes to the various parts of the story on our maps.
In our second lesson of the week we then used our new maps to re-tell our stories to each other with the included changes. Our teachers modelled how to use the story map to begin writing our story of Jack and the beanstalk and how to cross through each section as we went along, to help us remember where we had got to in the story. As we wrote our adapted stories we shared feedback about our writing and identified the elements we were expected to show including the use of capital letters, full stops, finger spaces and the changes of character, setting and objects.
Across the week we continued to write our stories drawing on methods from the writing toolkit we created as a class to help us remember the key things to include in our written text.
We edited our stories to improve them and then during our last lesson we 'polished' our writing and then completed a final neat draft.
We enjoyed an English CHIL session based around our story theme of Jack and the beanstalk, exploring a range of activity stations including word searches, colour by number sheets, designing a cartoon strip and making puppets to act out the story.
Activities to try at home based on our week's school learning:
Pick a traditional tale and then read the story.
Draw pictures on a sheet of paper that show the main events of the tale you have chosen.
Create some drawings of the Characters from the story and cut them out to make into puppets before using them to tell the story.
The maths topic this week is all about comparing numbers and groups of objects and then identifying which one has more or less than the other.
On Monday we looked at comparing two pictures of cows on the interactive whiteboard and finding the one with the most patches. We discussed the language of more than, greater and less than and fewer in relation to the number of objects in two groups when comparing them and introduced the concept of equal to. The children were introduced to the greedy crocodile whose mouth always faces the biggest number and practised using the < and > symbols to show which of the two numbers given was greater than the other.
We then completed some challenges in our books about finding the greater and lesser value of two groups and recording this in a range of ways.
On Tuesday we used a maths version of rock, paper, scissors to compare two numbers and write number sentences on our white boards and to draw our crocodile eating the biggest number. We discussed the number line and how we could record and circle which number was greater and then shared methods for different ways to record this on our white boards. We used the mathematical language to verbalise our number sentences and talked about making sure the first number we used was the number we focused on in our sentences. For example, 3 is greater than 2 and 2 is less than 3.
On Wednesday we re-visited our number line and used it to mark our numbers and their relationship to each other using circling, arrows and number sequencing to explore number magnitude and place value positioning. We completed some challenges in our books and shared ideas about different ways we could compare numbers. We then completed a range of challenges, finding the missing numbers from number lines and recording where they belong in relation to the other numbers. We ended the week with a maths CHIL session to cement the concepts we had been learning and to record our mathematical problem solving through different activity stations.
Maths activities to try at home based around finding one more and one less.
Play 'More', 'less' or 'equal to'- Played like rock, paper scissors but players hold up a number of fingers on one hand after the count of three. Players then take turns to identify if the number they have is More, less or equal to the other players.
Roll a dice and then draw that number of circles or dots on a page. Take turns to draw what one more would be and what one less would look like. So if player 1 drew one less than the dice number, player 2 would draw one more.
Play the counter game. Place 20 counters or buttons on the table and then roll two dice. The first dice gives you the number I.e. 4 and the second dice tells you if you are taking one more or one less of that number. 123= 1 less and 456= one more. Player 1 rolls and then takes the number of objects from the table. So if they rolled 6 and 2 they would take one less than 6 off the table. (5 objects). Then player 2 has a turn and play continues until all the counters or buttons have been taken. Each player then counts up their total number of counters and the person with the most wins.
In Geography this week we looked at the physical and human features around our schools and made tally charts to see how many of each feature we could find. We talked about the difference between the two types of features and gave examples of some of them.
We discussed maps and looked at the school grounds on google maps to see what things mike look like from different angles and we used the directional compass language of North, south, east and west to explain the direction and position of some of the features we observed.
Activities to try at home:
If you can access it, go onto google maps and search for your house, street or local area. Discuss the features from the map that can be seen and the way it has been shown. Does it look different on google maps than in real life? Why might this be? What features on the map are human features and which are physical features? Can you list them?
Art was messy fun as we created our final art pieces for our exploration of Jackson Pollock and his drip paintings. We discussed the techniques we had used and the effects we were able to make on the paper by copying his method of painting.
We had a teacher celebration day on the Monday and the children gave us cards, gifts and pictures which were very gratefully received. The Year 1 team would like to thank everyone for all the hard work and a special thanks to all of the children for keeping it a secret so brilliantly.
We have been our PE lessons this week with the children learning about how to control and strengthen their bodies in our gymnastic lessons and had lots of fun learning some hockey skills during our Thursday lesson.
The children also had their photographs taken and showed some excellent understanding of our Crabtree rules and how to be safe when moving around the school.
Next week where as part of our timetable we will be looking at Black History Month. We look forward to seeing every one again next week for week 6
Have a lovely weekend,
The Year 1 team.
