Year 1

This half term in year 1 we have been focusing on the traditional tale of ‘The Elves and the Shoemaker’. We linked this to the animation of ‘Le Petit Cordonnier’ which did not have dialogue.

The children looked carefully at the language the traditional tale used and the punctuation to support emphasis. Each day the children developed ideas for the next part of the story and then used this work to create a written story for Le Petit Cordonnier. They really enjoyed learning about inverted commas, ellipsis and writing words in bold to stand out.

The children wrote amazing stories and enjoyed sharing them in their classes!

This half term the children have been learning about both fiction and non-fiction texts. As part of their continuing topic of ‘Our Planet and Beyond’, the children wrote their own non-fiction booklet. The children learnt about the layout of different non-fiction texts, and what they should include.  Their final pieces contained a front cover and a contents page as well as information about planets, the moon and Earth. They really enjoyed sharing their own non-fiction books with children in Year 2.

The children also enjoyed writing a letter to either Mel Clarke, a Paralympian who competed in London 2012 Olympics and won a silver medal in archery, or Sophie McKinna, who has been in the Tokyo Olympic games and will be going to Paris to compete this year in shotput.

They have recapped their letter knowledge to write their own letters including the address, formal language and adding question marks after a question. We are hoping that we shall receive a reply and cannot wait to see the Olympics start this year!

The children in year 1 have absolutely loved sharing the book ‘Alan’s big scary teeth’ by Jarvis in our English lessons this half term. They found this text very funny and engaging! The children were able to talk about the events in the story and recall these to answer a range of questions about it.

Before we started reading the text the children learnt about Alligators. They researched about their habitat, appearance and diet. They created a non-fiction fact file about alligators focusing on writing subheadings for each section.

The children were able to use this information to support their discussions about the book and it also provided the children with a range of adjectives that could be used to describe Alan the alligator too! 

By the end of the unit the children got in groups to create a role-play of the story – these were amazing to watch as part of an audience. They each chose a character and thought about the words that character would say as well as how they would act!

This half term the children have become weather reporters and have really enjoyed this writing unit! They had a visit from Mr Bell, a meteorologist to start their Weather Experts topic. He spoke to the children about extreme weather but also gave some great advice for writing their own weather reports. Mr Bell provided the children with key words and phrases for their own reports.

Each day the children used the enquiry skill for Science, to observe over time, and recorded the weather patterns as a class. We then watched the weather report for East Anglia and made a word bank of more key words and phrases.

Before writing their weather report the children placed weather symbols on a map of the UK and used a script template to write their weather reports. Once finished, the children recorded their own weather report using Canva which made it look like they were really on the television!

They absolutely loved being weather reporters and look forward to seeing some of them being meteorologists when they are older.

This half term, the children have read the book ‘Dear Dinosaur’ in our English lessons. The children received videos and emails from adults that work behind the scenes in school, explaining what their job entails. The book which focuses on giving and receiving letters, inspired the children to write letters to their chosen member of staff. The children thought of questions that they would like to ask as well as introducing themselves. Here at Toftwood, we have amazing staff members who were kind enough to then write back to the children and responded to their questions.

The children then applied their letter writing skills to write a letter to Father Christmas explaining how they have worked hard this year and asking for a gift that they would like to receive. The children’s letters to Father Christmas were then delivered to the North Pole. The day after the letters were sent we received two presents under our class Christmas trees which included two books linked to Dear Dinosaur! They were Dear Spookysaur and Dear Chocosaur. The children thoroughly enjoyed reading these and making links to the other texts.

The children have really worked hard this half term. We have focused on writing sentences by remembering to include capital letters, finger spaces and full stops. They have enjoyed reading texts like Here We Are by Oliver Jeffers and The disgusting sandwich by Gareth Edwards. The children read the story of The Disgusting Sandwich and we linked this to our DT learning this half term. By the end of the writing unit the children had designed, made and evaluated their own sandwich with two fillings, written the instructions to make their delicious sandwich and created a one-page spread advertisement to entice a customer to want to buy their product! The children thought carefully about the description, a slogan and an appealing picture of their product.

The children also wrote a recount based on their visit from Wycomb Pastures Petting Farm which was linked to their topic of Animal Life. They learnt about using time adverbials and writing in the past tense.