Base 1 News

Wow! What a brilliant first half term we have had! I am so proud of how all of the children have settled into life in their new year groups, they have all worked very hard and deserve a lovely half term break.

We have been reading 'That Pesky Rat', a story by Lauren Child, in our literacy lessons over the last couple of weeks. It is a fabulous story that the children have enjoyed re-reading and working together to re-tell. The year 1 children have written letters to the Pesky Rat, inviting him to come and stay with us in Base 1, notices for the pet shop window and a non chronological report giving lots of factual information about the Pesky Rat for people who haven't had the pleasure of reading the story. The reception children have been working really hard in their phonics lessons and are starting to use some of their new skills in our literacy time. They have been identifying initial sounds in words as well as using their 'robot arms' to start reading some words.

In maths the year 1 children have been working on addition. They have been finding number bonds (numbers that add together to make a bigger number) for numbers within 10, we did this practically and with pictures before starting to record using number sentences. We will continue this work after the half term break. The reception children are becoming more and more confident with their counting, we have been counting EVERYTHING lately...blocks, shells, children, windows! Please do carry on this work at home if you can, encouraging the children to use their finger to touch the object as they count. We have also started to use the language of more and less to compare groups of objects.

We have really enjoyed learning all about our village over the past week. We went on a village walk with our buddies in Base 4 and they helped us look out for all of the people who might help us around the village and different things that keep us safe. Back at school we made maps of the village and labelled the different things we had seen.

In history we have been learning about The Great Fire of London, the children have absolutely loved learning about life in 1666 and the events surrounding the fire. They remembered all of the information brilliantly and the year 1 children put it all together in a timeline. We talked about whether we would prefer to live now or then if there was a fire (we learnt that the fire service was set up after the fire so it probably safer to be living now) and even managed to learn to sing London's Burning in a round! We learnt about the fire using a brilliant website that some of the children might like to look at again at home, I have put the link below:

http://www.fireoflondon.org.uk/game/

I hope everyone is having a wonderful half term break and I am looking forward to hearing all about it and seeing you on Tuesday.

Miss Pitchford