Year 1 - Rainbow Fish & Elmer
As readers
Our class book this half term is ‘Vlad and the Great Fire of London’. As a class, we will be deep diving into vocabulary, inference, prediction, explanation, as well as retrieving information from the text
As a key stage, we will be continuing to work on our reading using the Read Write Inc. Scheme. The children have been reassessed, and if necessary, and will be settled into their new groups at the start of the new half term. Parents should expect to receive a copy of the reading book the children are currently reading in their phonics groups, as well as a ‘Book Bag’ book.
As writers
Using our book, ‘Vlad and the Great Fire of London’, we will be working on a range of grammar devices to improve our writing, as well as using our senses to help us describe a setting from the story.
Key vocabulary: third person, senses, noun phrases, verbs, time adverbials.
As mathematicians
In maths, we will be starting the half term looking at fractions and identifying halves, quarters and wholes. After that, we will be investigating position and direction, where the children will be describing movement using Bee-bots. We will be re-visiting place value, this time with numbers up to 100. The children will learn how to partition numbers into tens and ones, use a numbers line and compare two-digit numbers. For the last maths topic of Year 1, we will be looking at time. The children will be learning the days of the week, along with the months of the year. We will start helping the children learn how to tell the time, initially teaching them about time on the hour and half-past the hour, as well as how many minutes there are in these time frames.
Key vocabulary: whole, half, fraction, parts, quarter, equal turn, direction, position, left, right, partition, tens, ones, digit, year, day, week, month, hours, minutes, second.
As scientists
In science, we will be observing animals; learning to identify and name some of the most common in our world, then sorting them using a given criteria. We will also be examining the diet of animals and identifying, naming and sorting animals into their food groups – herbivores, carnivores and omnivores.
We will also be examining how the seasons differ during the year. We will observe the signs of summer and and how day length varies throughout the year. We will continue to build on what the weather is like during each season, and delve into how environmental changes of our world has affected it.
Key vocabulary: changes, frost, bloom, robin, brood, territory, mate, spring, summer, autumn, winter, weather, hibernate, adapt, moulting, daylight, daytime, night-time, earlier, later, data.
As historians
We will be focusing on the 17th century’s Great Fire of London. We will be examining the key events of the devastation and destruction of London, as well as discussing why the fire spread so quickly and how it affected the people of London’s lives.
Key vocabulary: destroyed, devastation, destruction, abandon, flee, ember, homeless, rebuilt.
As artists
Our artist this half term is Vincent Van Gogh, who was a Post-Impressionist painter and known for the striking colour, emphatic brushwork, and contoured forms of his work that powerfully influenced the current of Expressionism in modern art. We will be working creatively to find out how we can use his techniques to create a silhouette effect of the Great Fire of London.
Key vocabulary: silhouette, brushwork, landscape, collage, abstract, portrait.
