I hope you all had a lovely Christmas break and I wish you all a Happy New Year! The children have come back to the classroom refreshed and recharged which is lovely to see! Here is what we have been learning about this week.

Maths

In our Maths learning this week, we have started our new unit on Place Value: Numbers up to 20. We started to look at what all the numbers from 10 - 19 have in common, and that is they all contain a 10. We looked at how we can spot pictures of 10 by looking for a full ten frame, a stick of 10 (base 10), or a numicon of 10 straight away. We also looked at the numbers 11, 12 and 13. On Friday, we built these numbers using base 10 and practiced counting pictures to 10. 

Look at these pictures below. Can you find out which ones are 11, 12 and 13? Remember, you can count from 10, and do not need to count from 1!

Counting Games

- Helicopter Rescue - https://www.topmarks.co.uk/learning-to-count/helicopter-rescue

- Blast Off - https://www.topmarks.co.uk/learning-to-count/blast-off

- Constellation Counting - https://ictgames.com/mobilePage/constellation/index.html

English

In our English learning, we have started our new T4W unit by looking at a Tale of Fear story. We are learning the story of The Giant Jumperee by Julia Donaldson. This is a story about a group of animals who discover a fearsome animal in a burrow, which turns out to be a baby frog. We created a story map using our Mighty Writer toolkit. We then also drew our own story maps of the story. Finally, we looked at some difficult vocabulary from the text. Have a look at the word mat below. Can you tell your grown-ups what each of the words mean? There is also the story and story map below if you would like to have a go at reading it!

Geography

This term, we are doing a block of Geography to really engage the children in their knowledge and understanding of the world. In Year 1, our country of focus is Kenya, but we also look a lot at the UK and our surrounding village and town as well. 

Before we look at Kenya, we need to understand our our country and where our country is situated within the world. 

We started to look at the UK and what the UK looks like by using a map.

We learned a very catchy song to help us remember the different countries that make up the United Kingdom which you are welcome to watch the video here.

Can you tell your grown-ups what countries make up the United Kingdom?

We also learned about the continents of the world as well to get an understanding of where we are in the world, and where Kenya is in the world. We learned a very catchy song to help us remember the continents. If you want to listen to this, click here for the Youtube link.

Can you tell your grown-up all the 7 continents?

Which continent do we live in?

Which continent is Kenya in?

Here are some photos of us putting the continents back together below!

Phonics

This week in our phonics we have been learning about the digraphs ue, ue and ew. Please use the 'Monster Phonics - Time to Read Sheets' to practise these digraphs if your child is unsure on these sounds. 

Spellings

You may have noticed that for certain children there may be more spellings than the 8 before. I have decided to increase the amount of words to 10 so the children are familiar with practising more words.

Have a lovely weekend everyone! Well done on a great first week back!

Mr Armishaw