Welcome to the exciting world of the Wonderful Ones!
We are full of fun, laughter, enthusiasm and love.
There are 33 of us including Mrs Morland, Miss Corrigan and Mrs Watt.
'For the spirit God gave us does not make us timid, but just gives us power, love and self-discipline.'
(2 Timothy 1:7)
The Nativity 2024
Key Stage One have a really special job to do this week and that is to share the Christmas story. We have learnt some songs, practiced our acting and words to say. We have worked really to put all these elements together to tell this important story. Mrs Morland, Miss Corrigan and Mrs Watt were really proud of us . We made sure everyone had a smile and they were filled with Christmas joy.
Watch the video clip below and you will see and hear which was our favourite song that we performed…….!
Christmas is Coming!
Today we set ourselves a challenge to spread Christmas joy around school. We decided to choose an adult and make them a card to show them how much we appreciate everything they do for us. In the picture on the front, we thought carefully about what to draw to show everything we have learnt so far about the Christmas story.
All these teachers were delighted with their cards!
Then we started our celebrations early! After Mass, we changed into our party clothes. Then we shared some food together before playing some party games with our friends in Year Two. MERRY CHRISTMAS everyone!
On our last day before the Christmas holidays, we played some games. We worked in teams to play dominoes, snakes and ladders and connect 4. Some of us even worked together to make a jigsaw. Playing games might not look like work but it helps us to work on our social skills such as turn taking and following rules as well as developing our maths skills. We had lots of fun!
Today is Christmas Jumper Day and we are all feeling very festive! We are wearing our jumpers to raise money for children who are not as lucky as us.
We love phonics so we decided to use the graphemes that we have learnt to make different words. When we coloured the words they made our own Christmas jumpers!
Ho Ho Ho Guess who came to see us……
We're going on a tree hunt! 04.12.24
Today we were detectives as we explored the woods in Middleton Park. As we were walking, we identified the trunk, bark, branches, roots and leaves on the trees we saw. We also noticed that in some parts of the woods there were more deciduous than evergreen trees. We know that not all trees are the same so we looked really carefully to describe how they were the same and different to each other. Then we split into teams and used a checklist to name different trees using the leaves. We looked carefully at the leaves and compared them as we noticed that even leaves from the same tree look different to each other. By the end of our tree hunt, we had found beech, elder, oak, horse chestnut, silver birch, hazel, plane, holly and pine trees. No wonder we were tired when we got back to school!
P is for Preparation
Advent is here! We started getting ready for Christmas by changing the cloths on our class and library prayer tables to purple.
Then we made an Advent wreath for our class. We counted five candles, three purple, one pink and one white. We learnt that we light the purple and pink ones each week in Advent and the white one on Christmas Day. We noticed that the Advent wreath is a circle to remind us that God's love has no beginning or end. Then we worked together to use evergreen leaves around the candles. We know that evergreen leaves won't change colour, just like God's love for us will not change no matter what we do. We did such a good job creating our wreath that Mrs Everett asked us to make another for the prayer table in the library. We were excited to see Father Polland when he came to bless all our Advent wreaths.
Finally we used playdough and Lego to show our understanding of the different parts of an Advent wreath.
Our preparations did not stop there! We decided to make an Advent tree. We added lights to the tree to remind us that Jesus is the light of the world. Then we wrote a promise that we hung on the tree. Each day, as we count down to Christmas, we are going to turn over a promise and we are going to try and keep it.
Hmmmm delicious!
This week is our school Christmas Fayre and to help us raise lots of money for our school, we made some tasty treats. We worked together in teams to make peppermint creams and mince pies. It was fun, messy and for some of us it was the first time we had baked.
Everyone is a Reader
Today we had some special visitors, some of our parents and carers came to read with us! We started by showing them how we read using the rule of 3. First we segment and blend trickier words. Then we reread the sentence and finally we read the same sentence one more time with expression. When we read like this, we are becoming more confident and fluent readers who understand more of what we are reading. When we were reading together, one person pointed to the words for their partner to read and then we swapped over. We really enjoyed reading with our grown ups and talking about what we were reading. We really were reading together!
Practicing reading at home is just one way to get better at reading, reading for pleasure is important too so before we went home Mrs Morland shared a story with us. It was called 'The King's Hats' and it is now one of our favourites!
We are all Talented!
Today we had a special treat…….we went to the cinema to watch Trolls:Band Together. We had lots of fun watching the film and dancing along but watching it reminded us that God made us all unique and all talented.What are your gifts from God?
We love new book day!
Every Friday is always exciting in Year One because we get a new reading book to take home. We have a first look when we read with our partner. We work as a team to read the new story together, supporting each other to segment and blend tricky words.
November is the month when we remember those who have died and gone to be with God. We know that poppies are a special flower at this time of year and so we worked creatively to make our own.
Today we had a special class worship. We stopped and said special prayers for those we wanted to remember.
We even planted our own poppies and all through November we are going to care for them. As they grow, we will take time to remember all those important to us.
The Marvellous Mr Burt!
Every Thursday, we sing with Mr Burt and it is one of our favourite parts of the week. We are starting to learn about rhythm and how to change the pitch of our voices when we sing. We have learnt lots of new songs and our favourites are ‘The Little Green Frog’ and ‘Hallelujah’. Watch the videos below for a little taste.
Some of us are even brave enough to sing on our own. Have a listen to some of our beautiful voices….
We are Thankful 18.10.24
Today we led the whole school worship and we reminded everyone how important it is to be thankful. We shared the creation story and then we asked our friends to close their eyes and reflect on what they had heard
We ended our worship by sharing one of our favourite songs called ‘If I Were a Butterfly’. Watch the video below to hear a little taste….
Marvellous Middleton
This half term in Geography we are learning about our local area. So far we know that we live in a city called Leeds and we live in a town in Leeds called Middleton. We used aerial photographs to describe Leeds and Middleton and then we found the streets where we live on a street map of our area.
Today we explored our local area around our school. We found our school, our nursery, our church, houses and shops. We used what we saw to draw our own maps. We added the names of the different types of shop such as a butchers, an optician and a pharmacy. We also added street names and other features like traffic lights and zebra crossings. Back in the classroom, we used our maps to tell our friends about Middleton.
We are now experts on our local area! After looking at a street map of the area around our school, we our knowledge and what we had seen on our walk to create our own 3D maps. When we had made them, we used directed small world people to different places. This helped us practice our geographical vocabulary and check that we had now missed our any important features that make Middleton marvellous!
We are all Readers
We have lots of books that we enjoy going back to over and over again. We recommend ones to our classmates and share others with our friends like this….
Acrostic Poems
In English, we have started learning about acrostic poems. We discovered that each line starts with a capital letter and those letters spell out the theme of the poem. We used this knowledge to reorder a poem that had been jumbled.
To get ready to write our own acrostic poem, we practiced forming capital letters correctly. We started by warming up our muscles with special exercises then we practiced each letter in each different family.
We have read several acrostic poems and one of our favourites is N is for Nature by Angie Turner. We set ourselves a challenge to learn it off by heart and we put actions to each line to help us remember the words. Watch the video below and enjoy…..
Our Prayer Garden
This week Father Polland came to bless our new and improved Prayer Garden.
Year One went to visit to see what it was like and we noticed lots of prayers and other objects that will help us when we worship.
We decided to have our class worships out there. As well as saying our prayers, we created our own prayer with each one of us saying what we would like to thank God for.
What a Wonderful Week!
We have had a very busy first week in Year One and we are already learning so much!
In RE, we went outside to look for all the beautiful things that God has created and we had a special class worship to say thank you to him.
In Maths, we sorted objects in different ways. We decided to line up the objects once we had sorted them to make them easier to count.
In Art, we experimented with spirals and we used lots of different materials to create them.
Finally, we spent some quiet time in the library choosing ourselves a new book to share with our grown ups. The library is one of our favourite places in the whole school.
Phew, we are shattered but we have had lots of fun!
Meet the Teacher Meeting 05.09.24
It was lovely to meet so many of you on Thursday, some familiar faces and some new! Please find the PowerPoint below with all the information that we discussed. If you have any questions, please ask one of the Year One team.