Inspect, inspect, inspect…

You probably heard the news that we had VIPs in school this week! Thank you to everyone who submitted their views on the school as Ofsted do take your opinions very seriously. The full Ofsted report will be available for you to read in the new year. The children have been VERY excited and working extremely hard at practising for their Christmas plays next week! Thank you for sending in costumes – we know you are going to love seeing them perform. They are ALL fabulous!!!!

In maths this week, we have been learning about subtraction and the concept of taking away. We started the week by using practical resources to take away and we focussed on the language involved when taking away. We then moved on to exploring pictures and representations that show taking away, and wrote expressions and equations to match these. The children all did incredibly well and we are super impressed with their mathematician skills. Next week, we will be doubling. We will start off by talking about what doubling means and then move onto doubling practically using various resources such as cubes, counters, dienes etc. We will then double the spots on the ladybirds and write the answer underneath. Finally, we will use numicon to show our doubling skills and draw some in our maths books as well as writing the number sentences to match.

This week in English, we have been reading the popular book called ‘Grumpy Badger’s Christmas’ by Paul Bright and Jane Chapman. We started off by reading part of the book in the first lesson and then had a go at predicting what we thought might happen next using sentences such as “I think_____because_____”. In the next lesson, we then read the rest of the book and had a go at sequencing the main evens using pictures from the story. Next week, we will continue reading the same book. We will be looking at a range of invitations and asking the children questions such as “what do you notice?” and “why do you think they are written like that?” etc. The children will then have a phoneme session and find key words from the story to use in their own invitation. We will then look at using the word “and” to connect two ideas together and make our sentences longer. Finally, we will look at adjectives to describe the grumpy badger in the story. A busy week ahead!

Just a few reminders: 

• Please make sure all your child’s belongings are labelled. Things do go missing and I’m convinced there is a black hole somewhere in the school that sucks them in and they never come back. 
• Please send your child’s water bottle and book bag into school every day.
• Our Year 1 PE day is on a Monday for Hedgehogs and Tuesday for Bumblebees.
• Reading books in school are changed once a week and this will be every Monday. The books will be collected in in the morning and a new one will be issued that same afternoon.
• Library book change will be on a Friday.

Dates:

• 3rd December – Hedgehog Christmas Play 9.20am
• 3rd December – Bumblebee Christmas Play 2.15pm
• 12th December – Christmas Lunch
• 17th December – Year 1 Pantomime Trip
• 20th December – Last Day of Term

We like to think of ourselves as a friendly and approachable team and if there is anything you have concerns about, please let us know and we will do our best to help.  

Have a lovely weekend and see you next week!

Mrs Ford and the Year 1 team.