Friday 5th July

We have continued our learning about measuring time this week in maths. We started by practising reading the time on a clock for o’clock and half past. Ask your child what each hand on a clock represent. We then answered questions such as these: The next day we played ‘Stop the Clock’. This is a game you play with a partner. You set the clock to 6 o’clock and each person takes turns to move the hands half an hour forward or one hour forward. The winner is the person who stops the clock at 12 o’clock. Please play this game at home with your children and ask then to tell you the time on the clock. You could use a sheet of blank clock faces to draw the time.    The next day we put words that we use to measure time into order from the shortest to the longest. Ask your child if they can remember them all! We then estimated how many star jumps we could do in 20 seconds. Some of us were very surprised! We then made a list of different things we could do in 20 seconds. Here are some of our ideas:  We worked with a partner to predict how many we could do and then time and count. We had lots of fun!  Finally we tried to work out when one minute had elapsed. We tried this several time and we thought of some strategies to help us estimate more accurately. Ask your child if they can work out how long one minute is and keep practising reading the time.   This week in English we wrote our own story based on the Molly Rogers Pirate Girl.  We used our boxing up sheet to remind us of the key moments of the story. We co-constructed a toolkit to show the features of what a good story looks like. On Wednesday we had a Pirate Girl ChIL where we could extend our learning. We could read pirate books.  We could write  WANTED posters, more messages in bottles, pirate poems or pirate stories.  We took turns to work with our teachers to edit our own Pirate Girl stories to make them even better. At home your child may like to write their own pirate stories and bring them in to share with the class. Also they may like to practise these Year 1 common exception words. In art we  recreated this painting by Claude Monet using our colour mixing skills.  We mixed  primary colours to make secondary colours. We used a variety of brush strokes using different thicknesses of brushes.

Today we have enjoyed 'Friendship day'. We thought about what it means to be a good friend. We used this grid to help us decide how we can be an even better friend. 

We also wrote compliments for each other, as we know that a good friend uses kind words to their friends. The comments made us all very proud! 

We have also practised talking to each other as a good friend does. We used some of these questions to start a conversation: 

We hope that you have a lovely weekend and enjoy the sunshine! 

The Year One team 

- oh, and next year's Year Two team! 

Friday 28th June

What a wonderful day we have had in Southend.  Just look at our photos to see how much fun it was!   

This week in maths we have been learning about time.  On Monday we sequenced events using the following words

before,  after,  morning, afternoon, evening; first, next, then.  The children told their partner a sentence using these words.  Next they stuck a picture in their books and then drew a picture showing what could have happened before and after.

You may like to do a similar activity at home using the words above.

On Tuesday we put the days of the week in order and sang the days of the week song. We then asked these questions. How many days in a week? How do you know? Which days are school days? Which are the weekend? Which day comes after Tuesday?

We then put the months of the year in order and sang the months of the year song. We then asked these questions.

Do you know what month it is?  How many months in the year? Which is your birthday month? Which month is before May?

You may like to ask similar questions at home. Can your child make up their own questions?

We then looked at a calendar for 2019. We asked which year does it show?  We tried to crack the calendar code – number for the day, name of the month, number for the year.

We modelled how to find dates on a calendar and how we can see which day any date will be on.   We asked - which day will Christmas day be on? How many days in May?

Using the calendar below you may like to ask similar questions at home. Can your child make up their own questions? 

The following day we used clocks to tell the time. We showed the children when it reads o’clock the long hand points to the 12. Discuss how smaller hand points to the hour.  We also showed the times as digital times – eg 5:00 = 5 o’clock, 7:00 – 7o’clock etc.

Next we showed the children when it reads half past  the long hand points to the 6 (it has gone halfway round the clock.)

We divided the clock face into two halves and talked about how many minutes in an hour – 60. What is half of 60?

How many minutes in an hour? How many in half an hour?

At home you may like to help your child practise telling the time – o’clock and half past.

Spelling ideas. As we have been learning about the days of the week in maths your child may like to practise spelling all of the days of the week.  Can they put them in a sentence? This week in English we continued reading the story ‘Molly Rogers Pirate Gir’l by Cornelia Funke.    On Monday we pretended we were Molly and imagined what we would have written on the message in the bottle.  We had to remember the important information. ·         A title to get the reader interested ·         Where are you? ·         Who has captured you? ·         What you are doing? ·         Final plea for help…

On Tuesday we planned our stories.  We started by sharing our ideas.  We thought about

·         the name of the Captain in our story – Captain Blackbeard, Captain Goldbeard

·         the name of the ship – The Skull and Cross Bones, The Jolly Roger

·         the name of our Pirate boy or Pirate girl – Thomas, Sam,

·         the name of our rescuer – Brave Bill, Brave Dag, 

Then we thought about

·         the jobs our character would have to do – push the barrels of rum, scrub the decks,

·         the activities that the pirates could do at their party every night – eat cake all night long, play instruments, do handstands, drink rum

·         the horrible jobs that the Captain and his crew would have to do as a punishment – clean up the parrot poo, clean the toilets, sharpen the swords, polish the boots, cook all the meals……

·         any good words we wanted to .include – piractical nincompoops, Splish, Splash, Splosh, ransom

We then used a ‘boxing up sheet’ to plan our story drawing pictures of the key moments to remind ourselves of the plot.  

We will be writing our stories early next week. 

You may like to talk to your child about their story and get them to tell you it using story language.