Welcome to Finches

Term 4- Step Outside! Our topic this term is all about being outside, focusing on different features of our environment. We will be looking at our local area, as well as expanding our thinking and looking at cities around the world. 

Spring is most definitely in the air! The children have been enjoying our outdoor area, in particular using natural materials to create woven wall hangings to display in the classroom. They look brilliant! 

We have started the term basing our English learning around the story 'We're going on a bear hunt!' The children have been creating story maps to re-tell the story out loud, as well as thinking about how they would write their own bear hunt story. Oh No! A red hot lava lake! A huge icy mountain! An old, rickety bridge! We can't go over them, we can't go under them....oh no! We will have to go through them! 

Welcome to the Finches class blog!

The adults in our class are Mrs Roberts, Miss Majer, Mrs Meadwell and Mrs Jansauskiene. 

Term Two - Wonderful Weather!

Look outside, is it sunny, raining or even snowing? Can you see a beautiful rainbow in the sky?

This term we are going to be looking at weather and seasons. We will be taking part in performance poetry, where we learn a poem off by heart and perform it to the other year one class. Following that we will create our own poems about the weather. We will be comparing weather at different times of the year, looking at the months of the year and even measuring how much rainfall we have had over a week. We will be looking at the changes of shadows throughout the day and also having a go at making our own weather forecasts! 

Then we have also got our preparations for Christmas. We will be making Christmas cards and working really hard on creating a great performance. We hope you enjoy it! 

This week was our Christmas performance. We had a lot of different characters, including shepherds and their sheep, Mary and Joseph, a King and camels, snowflakes and angels, along with the narrators. Everyone showed great confidence on stage and spoke so loudly and clearly. We were so incredibly proud of all! 

Our Christmas performance is coming along nicely! We know all the words to the songs and we are mastering the actions. Those children with lines have done a fantastic job of learning them and we are beginning to remember our cues. We are looking forward to trying on our costumes next week. We hope you've ordered your tickets! 

For science day, we were thinking about seasonal change, which links nicely with our topic this term, Wonderful Weather. We discussed what changes happen with the seasons and had a go at some experiments. 

We explored what happens to ice when we add salt, we made a cloud in a jar and made it rain! We made wind socks and then went outside to test if they worked. We also discussed daylight hours - we made shadow puppets and explored what shadows they made. 

Term one - Superheroes! 

BOOM! ZAP! ZOOM! Evil Pea is taking over year one!

This term we will be looking at lots of stories and in particular the story of Supertato. Will Supertato be able to save us in time from Evil Pea? Only time will tell. 

Year one will be dressing up as their favourite superheroes using their super powers to jump, crawl and balance through the different obstacles put in their way. The children will also spend time learning about their bodies and their 5 senses. They will go back in time and look at a real life superhero called Florence Nightingale and how she changed hospitals for the better. 

Finches took their learning outdoors this week. We have been looking at the story of Red Riding Hood during our shared reading sessions and combined this with our geography by creating a map to Grandma's house. We used any natural resources we could find outside to create the layout of the story. We then used these to draw our own maps, even having a go at creating a key, for example, a conker represented a house. A fun way of developing our map skills! 

Why was Florence Nightingale so significant? That was the focus of Year one's History Day. We started by finding out who she was and what she achieved. We then spent the morning in the hall, taking part in various activities such as making a lantern so we could be the lady with the lamp, making potions, comparing artefacts to modern day items and making a timeline of Florence's life. We also took part in role play, where we explored the terrible conditions of the hospitals before Florence worked her magic. We then used that knowledge we had learned to create a fact file about this incredible lady. 

Finches are enjoying completing their mastering number sessions. We used the rekenreks for the first time today and had fun moving the counters around to find different ways of making a number. The children also really enjoyed the clicking sound the counters make when they tip them! 

Year 1 started our topic with a WOW day - superheroes! We came to school dressed as our favourite superheroes. We then spent the day performing various superhero activities - we completed an obstacle course to test our super strength and agility, we build our own secret lairs and we drew ourselves as a hero. A great day and a great start to year 1.