Miss L Freestone - Year R/1

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 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', 'The squirrels who squabbled', 'Each peach pear plum' 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. The children then make their own pumpkin soup in this topic! We use the Phunky Foods teachings of safe preparation and cooking techniques. 

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 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 learned to sew with a running stitch to create their own patchwork quilt for the home corner, and they enjoyed pretending to be elves in Santa's workshop! We went to the soft play to meet Santa himself, and we enjoyed our Christmas service at St Leonard's, really getting in to the Christmas spirit.

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 continued to explore seasonal changes as we moved in to Spring 1, looking at how we know Spring is arriving and the children loved sharing signs of Spring that they had seen when they were out in our local community. We read the book 'Standing Up to Racism' and have been discussing how we are all special. 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 really engaged with this topic and were eager to find out more about her and how she changed history. We asked and answered questions in role as Rosa Parks, we re-enacted her experience on the bus and discussed how she may be feeling about what was happening at this time. 

Reading Shu Lin's Granda moved our learning on to learning about a different culture and we learned all about Chinese New Year. The children really embraced the activities that arose alongside this story and were keen to extend their learning further. They asked lots of questions and were excited to learn all about the story behind Chinese New Year and how it is celebrated in different parts of the world today. The children tried their hand at Chinese writing, they made their own lanterns and they even cooked their own Chinese banquet, and impressed us all by eating it with chop sticks! 

The children made their own Chinese dragon and performed their own dragon dance in our outdoor provision. 

Spring 2

In Spring 2, we moved on to focussing more on the natural around us. Our class explored our local area, looking at human and physical features within our local community. We 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 explored the continents and oceans around the world, singing very catchy songs to help us to remember them!

We read the story 'Martha Maps It Out', reading all about her adventures and planning our own! This book supported 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.

We moved on to reading 'Mrs Noah's Garden' which took our learning to all about our natural world. We completed our own character profiles, wrote letters to Mrs Noah and thought of questions we could ask her. It also helped us explore the spiritual side of the story, learning all about Noah's Ark and the meaning behind this bible story. We explored what was in her garden and moved our learning on to learning all about life within our gardens and within our own forest school. We learned about different types of plants and their structures. We explored what they needed to grow healthily. We looked 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 celebrated World Book Day, sharing our love of reading with the older children in our school.

Continuing on with our learning about Spring, 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! 

Summer 1

This half term, we were on a mission to save our planet, starting with the bees! We read the story 'Winnie the Pooh Helps the Bees!' and decided we wanted to help the bees too. We had a local bee keeper, Debbie, visit us to teach us all about honey bees and how we can help them too. She even organised for us to visit our local bee apiary to experience being bee keepers ourselves! We loved trying the different types of honey depending on which flowers the bees had collected nectar from. We were surprised to find out that bees help other flowers to grow by taking pollen to different plants.

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

Useful Websites/Apps

White Rose Maths - 1 Minute Maths App

Cbeebies - Bedtime Stories

Top Marks - Maths Games

PhonicsPlay - Resources