Puffin Class News

This week we have come to the end of our Term 5 PSHE unit, Relationships. To celebrate this, in Year 1, we celebrated the special relationships we have with our peers. 

Our Big Science Event investigation is around the senses. As a year group, we decided to investigate ‘Do 6-year olds have better sense of taste than 5-year olds?’. We discussed how we could test this and decided to do a blind taste test of crisps to see how many children of each age can guess the flavour correctly. We began with a prediction, then the test, recording our results and drawing conclusions from this. Groups then made a poster for the Big Science Event where they presented their findings and evaluated the investigation. We used tally charts and histograms to present out data.

This week we have completed our DT unit, we are Drink Designers. We started by reviewing existing products and talked about why smoothies exist. We learnt about the nutritional value of fruit and why they are good for us. We then taste tested a range of fruit to decide which fruit we would like to include in our smoothie, and designed our smoothie. We learnt how to prepare fruit safely by washing our hands and the surface we are working on, and then learnt how to chop up bananas safely using a knife. Our last step was to make our smoothies. Here are some photos of the children with their smoothies. We loved it! 

The focus during today’s Art session is to ‘paint without a paintbrush’. The children learnt that we don’t have to just use paintbrushes to create a painting. We can use all different kinds of objects - things we have around the house, things we find in nature, and our own hands.

Using this technique, the children learnt about Abstract Art. Abstract art is a non-lifelike portrayal of real-world objects, people and scenes that are usually difficult for other people to recognise. It portrays what an artist feels and thinks, rather than what he or she sees, and often expresses emotions and ideas. Just as we do not know other people’s thoughts, we do not always know what abstract art portrays but if you ask the artist, he or she can explain the painting to you.

We explored what actions were used in a variety of paintings, eg. tapping, dripping, scraping, dabbing, flicking, swiping, and spraying, and created a collaborative abstract painting as a class.

We have been exploring traditional African jewellery in Art. Following our Art sequence, we explored traditional jewellery and discussed what we could see including the colours and patterns. After, the children practised this skill by creating and designing patterns, before designing their own necklace. Today they replicated their design and created their necklace. They loved wearing them for the day before taking them home! 

Year One have been reading the African tale, Mama Panya's Pancakes. We have been learning how to write the story from another character's perspective. The children chose to write about Mzee Odolo, a local fisherman, who is one of the many people invited to Adika's pancake party. To achieve this writing outcome, the children explored and learnt a model text of Mzee Odolo's day and were taught several SPAG skills to support, and extend their writing. This included the suffix -ed to write verbs in the past tense, question marks and how to record a conversation between characters.The conversation between the characters is a key part and is repeated throughout the story. 
 

The children loved this story, and really enjoyed retelling it. We are really proud of the children's writing. 

 To end our unit in PSHE unit, Dreams and Goals, we have been thinking and discussing how to embrace challenges. During our lesson, we talked about how to be a stretchy learner, just like how the flower and leaves stretches towards the sun, to reach our goals we must try hard and keep believing in ourselves. With this in mind, the children were set a challenging task with a set of instructions to follow independently. Whilst the children completed the task, we talked about how they might face challenges, how this feels, and how being challenged is a good thing as it stretches our learning. 

The children really enjoyed designing, creating and constructing their stretchy flowers. We are very proud of the children's independent determination displayed by this task. 

Today we recapped and reviewed the story/perspective we are learning how to retell. We read sentences and ordered the events, we talked about how we knew where they came in the story. After, we applied actions to help the children remember each event so they can confidently retell it later in the week.

Today the children learnt about questions. They learnt that a question is a type of sentence we ask or write to find something out. They identified question words in sentences, learning that a question word is a word that begins a question, e.g. who, what, where, when and how, and then practised this verbally and in our writing.

Today the children started their Geography unit. They explored the world using different media, including an atlas, a globe, google maps and a floor map. They learnt that a continent is a large solid area of land, made up of a group of countries, and that the world is split into seven of them. We listened and learnt a song to support us in learning about this, and then put together a large floor world map, before playing memory games to learn where the continents are, and the order of their size.

Today we have been ordering randomly chosen numbers from 0-20. We used vocabularly from previous lessons of greater than, less than and proved this on a number line. We then chose 3 numbers and made them with multilink to prove they are in the correct order. 

This week we have been learning all about numbers to 20. We will be exploring these numbers using different representations - tens frames, part whole models, base 10, bead strings, Rekenreks and numicon. 

We begun by looking at the place value, and counting to 20 on a number line, we identified numbers, one more, one less, counted forwards and backwards. In our first lesson, we used tens frames and base 10 to see what numbers beyond 10 are ten and a bit. We understood that when creating a number above 10, there was one full tens frame and a few more on the next. 

After, we explored another representation of ten, and how it could be applied to numbers above 10 too. We used towers of 10, base 10 rod and base 10 ones. We used subitising and our bonds to 10 to help us be quick and efficient - We don't need to count from the beginning. 

We then used a brand new resource called a Rekenrek. We explore numbers 11, 12 and 13. We learnt how to use a sweeping motion to move groups of beads along, again remembering that we do not always need to always count from the beginning. 

After, we used part-whole models, a resource we have used lots before, to make and represent numbers 14, 15 and 16. We are getting very confident with our understanding of tens and ones, remembering it is one lot of ten and .... ones. 

Today the children have been estimating on a numberline. We discussed that an estimate is a clever guess that we can work out the answer roughly. First we looked at number lines 0-10, as we are familiar with these, finding 5 which is half way between 0 and 10. After we used this knowledge to help us with numberlines 10-20. We draw our numberlines and practised estimating where the numbers should go, making sure our gaps between numbers were equal.

Today the children had a very exciting hook lesson for our new unit of work in English, invitation writing. After lunch, they found an invitation to Mrs Heason’s New Year party. As a class, we explored the invitation to make sure we know the key details, for example, where it is, when it is, what time it is. After the party, we talked about why we use invitations, if anyone had ever written an invitation, and why invitations need those key details on them. In the next few lessons, the children will explore a range of invitations, judging their effectiveness, before creating their own.

Today the children built upon their blending practise to create the background of their dinosaur scene. They experimented with adding white to their base colour to create lighter shades of it and in turn, made a colour gradient background. As well as this, the children learnt how to hold and use a paint brush effectively, experimented with how much paint they should use on their paint brush, and practised how to use the sweeping technique with their brush to create long strokes.

After exploring a range of paintings using different colour gradients, the children had creative freedom to create a picture displaying different colour gradients. They learnt how to use blending techniques to mix different colours. They were amazed with the different colours they could create and have created amazing pictures to showcase this.