KS1 – Newsletter – 30.1.26

As always, it has been a fun and interesting week in Key Stage One.

We began reading a new book called ‘The Hunter’ this week in English. We have been thinking about what an adventure narrative is and what it needs to include. We have been identifying and classifying words into nouns and adjectives. We then paired them up thinking about which adjectives would work well with a given noun and put them into sentences. We then began to think about different conjunctions that could be used to join to sentences together. We practised using them and thinking about which was the most applicable to join each of the sentences and why.

In Maths, Year One have been learning how to double numbers. They realised that doubling means adding the same number twice. They were able to do this practically with Numicon, Base 10 and other pictoral representations. They recorded doubles and near doubles, by drawing on ten frames and even answered some word problems. In Year Two, one group began solving problems using the inverse. They used lots of practical resources and discussion to think about how they could find the missing number and why. The other group began working with money. They identified what each coin was and thought about which coins they could use to buy different items. They also problem solved, to see if there was different ways of making the amounts.

We created some African Savannahs, using red, orange and yellow tissue paper to create a sunset background. Next, we used black card to create some tree and animal silhouettes for the foreground. Have a look at the photos to see how effective they were!

In Geography, we began to learn more about Africa. We looked specifically at Kenya and it’s capital Nairobi and compared them to England and Leeds. We thought about what the weather is like, what wildlife you would see there and what places there are to visit. We then thought about which place we would like to live in and why.

We continued exploring the properties of materials in science. This week, we took various items such as a sock, paper clip, wooden block, elastic band, plastic cup and a paper clip. We then tested each of them to see if we could squash, twist, bend or stretch them. We the recorded our findings in a table.

We read some more of Jesus’ parables in RE. First, we tried to remember the word ‘parable’ and the fact it meant his stories had a meaning. We all tried to work out what Jesus might have been trying to teach people and why.

We carried on with our conversation and experiment from last week in PSHE. We discussed what happened the last time we did an ‘art and craft’ activity where there were purposely not enough of each resource for everybody. Before we did the activity this week, we recapped some of the issues we found last time and the things we could do differently to make the activity work better this time. We then completed the crafting, showed each other what we had made and discussed whether we felt it had worked better and more fairly this time and why.

In PE, one lesson continued with invasion games and thinking about tactics. The other lesson was gymnastics. The children were thinking about different gymnastic positions and how to hold them. They also began to travel over the apparatus in a variety of ways, keeping a strong core, holding a posititon and landing safely.

Dates for your diary.

Friday 13^th February – Break up for half term

Monday 23^rd February – Return to school after half term