Our first topic in Year 1 is all about investigating the question

My home – where am I?

We are very excited to be exploring this geography-based topic and learning all about our local school, homes and local area.

In Geography, Year 1 will be learning about space and scale by looking at their classroom location. They will be looking at the location of our school on our street, including some of the other key human and physical features of the area. Children will explore the location of their town within the United Kingdom and learn about the UK’s four countries and capital cities. We will also be learning about the seasons in the United Kingdom and how they change.

In our English work, we are really excited to be reading the story ‘Meesha Makes Friends’. We will be learning new skills and applying them into our sentence work. We will be using capital letters, finger spaces, new vocabulary and finger spaces to combine words together and write a sentence grammatically correct.

In our Maths work, we are going to be looking at ways to sort and count objects based on their properties and working with numbers within 10. We will be counting forwards and backwards and finding 1 more and 1 less than a given number. We will be ordering and comparing numbers using the language more than, less than and equal to alongside the mathematical symbols < > =.

In Science, children will be investigating different materials and their properties by looking closely at objects found around the classroom. We will also be investigating how leaves change on different trees throughout the year. We will also be exploring the 5 senses by looking at different tastes, what we can hear, what smells we like and dislike, what we can see in our environment and explore the world using our sense of touch.

In RSHE, the children will be exploring friendship thinking carefully about what a good friend looks like. We will be exploring kindness and identifying how we are similar yet different from one another. We will be promoting respect and celebrating our differences; noticing what our strengths are and that it is who we are that makes us unique.

In art, we will begin by using marks to draw lines and repeated patterns. We will be experimenting painting with different paintbrushes to ultimately create a piece of artwork inspired by the artist Paul Klee.  

In our computing lessons, Year 1 will be looking at digital painting. We will be using different line and shape tools to paint a digital picture and compare it to a painting completed on paper. We will also be identifying different types of technology and its main parts. We will also be thinking carefully of the rules for using technology safely.

In RE, we will be investigating different celebrations and festivals including Christmas, Diwali and Hannukkah. We will be looking at who celebrates these different events, how they are celebrated and why people celebrate them.

Our Music lessons are based around a song that we learn. During this time, we use our voices expressively and creatively by singing and accompany this by playing tuned instruments. We will be listening with concentration and understanding a range of high-quality live and recorded music and experiment with, create, select and combine sounds.

Turtles have a safe space to explore their feelings and learn strategies to help understand and regulate our emotions better. We will embrace diversity and recognise the ways in which we are all different and understand what it is to be respectful, kind and use strategies to promote inclusion and kindness.