Term 5 Review – Year 1

Year Group Blog end of term, term review, year 1 0 Comments

Year 1 have had a fantastic Term 5! Read on to find out about some of the exciting things we have been learning over the past few weeks!

English – This term, we have been learning all about the Traveller community by exploring the character of Ossiri, a Traveller girl, in our book ‘Ossiri and the Bala Mengro’.

We have been thinking about different viewpoints and how we can use language to persuade people to agree with something that we feel strongly about. We particularly enjoyed having class debates around the statement ‘Ossiri’s father SHOULD let her play an instrument’, with the classes splitting into two groups, one arguing for and the other against.

We have also made and named junk instruments, just like Ossiri did in the book, and have written instructions detailing the steps that we took and the materials we used.

We had a great time playing these instruments in our Charanga music lessons!

We had fun making storymaps using the time words first, next, then and finally, learning about the importance of oral storytelling, and we enjoyed exploring stock character types too, focusing particularly on the ogre.

We thought carefully about the language used to describe the ogre in the book and came up with a vocabulary bank which we then drew on to make salt dough figures of what we imagine an ogre to be like. This helped us to understand how authors develop stock characters into characters with thoughts, feelings, opinions and names.

What is the difference between a character’s appearance and personality?

Maths – Year 1 have enjoyed learning about mass and volume this term. We have been introduced to counting in 2s, 5s and 10s and have learnt about rows and columns in an array. We are also now able to find both half and a quarter of a shape or a quantity.

Can you challenge yourself to find a quarter of 40?

Science – After learning about Ossiri’s clever use of materials to make an instrument out of recycled junk in our English lessons, we have enjoyed exploring a range of materials in our Science this term, thinking carefully about the different properties those materials have and how we might group them together. We also had lots of fun working in table group teams to create a Venn diagram out of hoops to classify a set of objects.

What is the difference between an object and a material?

History – We began Term 5 by bringing in photographs of special events in our lives which we all really enjoyed sharing with each other.

We were able to use these photographs as a starting point to think carefully about changes over time before moving on to explore timelines, family trees and time words. We organised important historical British Royal events on a timeline and used time words in our descriptions of Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation in 1953.

It was interesting to compare what life was like for children in the 1950s to what life is like for us today, as well as compare Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation with her son King Charles III’s which we were all lucky to experience earlier this month.

Can you remember in what year King Charles III was born?

PHONICS REMINDER!!!

It is now only a matter of weeks until the Phonics Screening Test in June and it is imperative that all children are regularly practising their Phase 3, 4 and 5 sounds, as well as their segmenting and blending of real and alien words over the May Bank Holiday week.