Welcome to Year One! We are looking forward to this exciting term and very much look forward to teaching the children the routines of Year 1 as they settle back into school with their new class. Our first topic is called ‘My Super School’ and we will have some special friends in the form of Mr Men and Little Miss characters who we will introduce and share all of our knowledge about our life at Tweseldown.

Through our geography learning, the children will find and show the characters the different features we have in school. They will learn the difference between human and physical features and classify those that we have in school. We will make our own maps to show the Mr Men and Little Miss how to find their way around the school. We will then explore the question ‘Are all schools the same?’ and compare the different features of another school in the UK. Finally, we will carry out fieldwork investigating places around the school that the Mr Men and Little Miss characters would like to spend their time.

Our English learning will support this by creating tour guides for the new Year R children to help them know about the different places in school. We will focus on our sentence writing skills of forming all letters correctly, sitting the letters neatly on the line and beginning to write sentences with accurate full stops and capital letters. We will encourage the children to use their phonics skills to sound out their words and will focus on using the learned high frequency word spellings from Year R. The children will also be reading Mr Men and Little Miss stories and will use these to enthuse and inspire their writing for their very own Mr Men adventures.

We will be developing our sketching skills within art and will use these as our front covers to the written tour guides created in our writing. We will be introduced the artist Stephen Wiltshire and discuss different work of his and our preferences. The children will practise their sketching techniques and learn how to do shading and adapt the tone of their line with their pencil. The final piece will be a sketch of the school with a ‘pop’ of colour. This will also allow the children to focus on careful colouring techniques. Our science learning, will also see us going on a hunt around school to explore the different materials that we find in school and what they are used for. We will learn about the different properties of materials and compare and group the materials. Finally, the children will consider why certain materials are used for certain jobs by investigating questions such as ‘Would fabric make a good table? Or ‘Could you make a ceramic blanket?’

In maths, we will build on the children’s learning from Year R. We will continue counting forwards and backwards to 30. The children will learn how different numbers are made and represent these in different ways using numicon, bead strings and counters. The children will be introduced to part, part, whole models and this will help them to demonstrate the composition of different numbers.

It looks to be a wonderful term where the children will get to share everything they know and love about Tweseldown and we can not wait to get started with them.