Mrs L Vine - Year R/1 | Montreal Church of England Primary School

Reception and Year One Class Page

Staff:

Class Teacher - Laura Vine

Teaching Assistants - Ellie O'Sullivan, Darcy Sproat, Brook Connolly

Higher Level Teaching Assistant - Helen Nicholson

Reminders:

School starts at 8.45am and finishes at 3.15pm.
All clothes, including coats, should be labelled with your child's name.
Please let us know if someone different will be collecting your child from school.
Homework will be given out each week and is due in on Thursdays. We encourage your child to write in their own homework books, with your guidance and support.
Phonics videos will be set on Tapestry each week for your child to watch, carefully matched to your child's current phonic knowledge. Please watch these with your child each week.
Strive for reading at home 5 times a week - this includes practising sounds, reading our Phonics books, reading library books and books from home.
PE takes place every Monday morning and Friday afternoon, your child will need their school PE kit and some trainers/pumps for when we complete our PE sessions outside. Your child may come to school in their PE kit on Monday mornings and bring their uniform in their bag to get changed in to afterwards.
Please remove all earrings for our PE sessions.

Autumn 1

We welcome the children to our school with our 'Marvellous Me' topic. This unit is a great way in supporting the children in getting to know each other and support the transition in to our classroom. We look at ourselves, our family, our homes and friendships, helping the children in understanding what makes them valuable individuals and supporting them in building constructive, respectful relationships. We use the teachings of Kidsafe to help the children to express their feelings and consider the feelings of others. We also look at how to keep ourselves safe and what to do if we ever feel sad, scared or worried. The work on feelings and emotions builds as the year goes on whilst learning about Decider Life Skills, a programme adopted throughout school to support children in looking after their mental health.

Learning about ourselves helps us develop our knowledge of past, present and future in relation to their own lives, linking it in with the life cycle of a human. We explore how to keep ourselves healthy and the importance of a balanced diet. The children look at the make up of a human and naming body parts.

We explore our community, looking at our school grounds, our homes and our local area. We discuss local wildlife and explore hibernation. We visit our church to celebrate Harvest Festival, discussing how we can help our local community and the importance of 'love others as well as you love yourself'.

In RE, we look at the Questful units 'I am special' and 'How can we help those who do not have a good harvest?' We also explore the Hindu celebration of Diwali, looking at how it is celebrated and we create our own Rangoli Patterns and Diya Lamps.

We also start our work looking at seasonal changes, which is continued throughout the year as the seasons change.

All of our learning is based on CUSP structured story time, using stories as a basis for learning. In Autumn 1, we read the stories 'What makes me a me?', 'I'm (almost) always kind', 'The dark', 'In Every House on Every Street', 'The squirrels who squabbled' and 'Funny bones'.

Autumn 2

As we move in to the second term of our school year, we focus on the season of Autumn and the changes we begin to see all around us. We start by reading 'Pumpkin Soup' and use our inference skills to decide what the characters might be saying/thinking. We hot seat the characters and have the opportunity to ask/answer questions in role. This story builds upon our learning in Autumn 1 of what makes a good friend and how we can view situations differently.

We move on to the story 'The Gingerbread Man', where the children can actively retell the story using props, actions and words. We made our own gingerbread men and decorated them - the children thought they were delicious, especially dipped in a cup of milk! We used our previous learning of the Phunky Foods teachings of safe preparation and cooking techniques. We inferred what the characters could be saying in each part of the story, and the children reflected this within the provision, making their own houses and role playing the different characters.

The children were excited as December hit to experience the Christmas activities we had planned. The children embraced creating their own adventures in the provision based around Christmas, making sleighs and delivering presents to us all. Ho ho ho! We met Santa himself and found it very magical to share our wishes and feelings at this festive time of year. Stu-di-doo came to our school and we loved watching his magic show - it was very funny and mysterious! We also took part in our school's Christmas Window competition and were delighted to find out that our window was voted the winner!

We also enjoyed our Christmas service, watching Reverend Nicki and the older children perform the Christmas story. We sang lots of carols, really getting in to the Christmas spirit. Throughout December, the children took part in our school Posada, taking Mary and Joseph home to celebrate Christmas with their families. Mary and Joseph thoroughly enjoyed their sleepovers and taking part in activities with the children.

We were very proud of the children taking part in our nativity, they performed and sang beautifully to all of our loved ones.

Spring 1

We continue to explore seasonal changes and how we know it is Winter. We look for and share the signs of Winter, and discuss how plants/trees change in the Winter and how some animals migrate or go in to hibernation. We have read the book 'Standing Up to Racism' and have been discussing how we are all special, exploring the word 'equal' and how we should 'stand up' for what is right, using our Kidsafe rules of 'Stop, Walk Away and Tell a Trusted Grown Up' if we ever see/experience something that gives us 'Yucky Feelings'.

The children lead this learning on to exploring Rosa Parks and how she helped changed the world by standing up for what was right. The children have really engaged with this topic and were eager to find out more about her and how she changed history.

As the topic progressed, we asked and answered questions in role as Rosa Parks, re-enacting her experience on the bus and discussing how she may be feeling about what was happening at this time. The children have enjoyed taking this learning in to the provision, using our role play 'bus' to deepen their understanding of the topic and to extend their learning by going on their own adventures, all whilst bringing in their knowledge of how Rosa Parks helped make the world a better place for everyone.

Chinese New Year begins on the 29th January and we will be reading Shu Lin's Granda, moving our learning on to learning about a different culture and learning all about Chinese New Year. We will learn all about the story behind Chinese New Year and how it is celebrated in different parts of the world today. The children will then try their hand at Chinese writing, making their own lanterns and even cooking their own Chinese banquet, and impress us all by eating it with chop sticks!

The children will work together to make their own Chinese dragon and perform their own dragon dance in our outdoor provision.

Spring 2

In Spring 2, we will move on to focussing more on the natural around us and new life. We will explore life cycles and which animals are born during the Spring time. We will also look at which plants grow in the Spring time and how the trees change.

We will read 'Mrs Noah's Garden' which will take our learning to all about our natural world. We will complete our own character profiles, write letters to Mrs Noah and think of questions we could ask her. It will also help us explore the spiritual side of the story, learning all about Noah's Ark and the meaning behind this bible story. We will explore what is in her garden and move our learning on to learning all about life within our gardens and within our own forest school. We will learn about different types of plants and their structures. We will explore what they need to grow healthily. We will look at local wildlife and found out all about tadpoles, using the story 'Tad' to develop our understanding of the life cycle of a frog.

As a whole school, we will celebrate World Book Day, sharing our love of reading with the older children in our school.

Continuing on with our learning about Spring, we will explore the signs of Spring and go on our own hunt to spot the signs of Spring for ourselves! Last year, we were over the moon to have some special visitors in our class - Batman and Po, two lambs who belonged to one of our classmates. They helped us to extend our learning about Spring time, new life and life cycles. We found out lots of facts about lambs, and we even got to cuddle and feed them! We will have two different lambs to visit us this year, I wonder what they will be called?!

Summer 1

This half term, we will be going on a mission to save our planet, starting with the bees! We will read the story 'Winnie the Pooh Helps the Bees!' and decided how we can help the bees too. One of our friends, had a local bee keeper called Debbie, will visit us to teach us all about honey bees and help us find out how we can help them too. Debbie very kindly organises a special trip to visit our local bee apiary to experience being bee keepers ourselves! We will try the different types of honey depending on which flowers the bees had collected nectar from. We will find out interesting facts about bees, such as finding out that bees help other flowers to grow by taking pollen to different plants.

We will develop this desire to help the bees to moving on to helping our local community.

Summer 2

In our last half term, we will be going on lots of new and exciting adventures!

We will read the story 'Martha Maps It Out', reading all about her adventures and planning our own! This book will support us in learning all about how our local community is part of a bigger place within our county, our country, our continent and our universe.

Our class will go on an adventure to explore our local area, looking at human and physical features within our local community. We will also completed lots of map work, starting with a map for the characters who were going on a bear hunt, moving on to looking at maps of the UK and the world. We will recap our learning of continents and oceans around the world, locating them on world maps and singing very catchy songs to help us to remember them!

We will explore the life of a famous pioneer, Amelia Earhart, who will help us to aim high and dream big - we are not too small to make a difference!

We will look at photos of Amelia Earhart and make predictions about why she is famous - do historical photos give us any clues as to who she was and why we remember her today? We will look at how air travel has changed to what it is today and have a go at making our own aeroplanes!