Elm - Year 1

Create your own painting/drawing of the Great Fire of London.

Year 1 looked closely at primary sources to see how technology has changed. They enjoyed listening to music from a cassette player and a DVD player, as well as looking a Victorian iron, a Bakerlite phone, an early Apple computer, and so much more! They asked lots of good questions about the items and made inferences about their uses and how they worked.

Well done for two fantastic performances of our Nativity, Elm class!

Elm class enjoyed a history workshop about The Great Fire of London today. Adrian demonstrated how the wind helped a small spark to develop into a huge fire, engulfing the city of London. We passed round artefacts from around 1066 and talked about how fire fighting has changed since the Great Fire. What a super day!

Elm class went on a welly walk in the grounds of the school and church. We looked for evergreen trees and collected leaves that had fallen onto the ground from deciduous trees. The children used magnifying glasses to look closely at the different leaves then enjoyed making some wax rubbings of them.

Elm class have been comparing school life today with that of the 1990s, 1950s and Victorian times. We enjoyed visiting the Victorian classroom in the Cottage Museum. We looked at artefacts from the Victorian era and noticed how many items were made from wood rather than plastic like today.

The children have been comparing school life in the 1950s, 1990s and today. Some of the children have managed to bring in photographs of their grandparents at school! We worked out that 1950 was 73 years ago and we showed this with a bead string.

The children are really enjoying our book, ‘The Lonely Beast’. Today we freeze-framed the reactions of the city people as the Beast arrived in the city. Great facial expressions, Elm class!

In Science we have enjoyed exploring our five senses. We smelt garlic, rosemary, mint and cheese; and tasted some bitter, sweet, sour and salty foods! Some of them weren’t very popular with Elm children!

We had a brilliant afternoon researching Emperor penguins and looking at their distinct marks. We then created masks to look just like them.

We looked at the similarities and differences between school dinners now and then. Then we found some pictures of school dinners and ordered them from now to in the past. We looked for clues in the pictures to help us order them.

We thought about things that make us, us. In our circle we drew things that represent our identity.

Danny, James and Gabe created a wonderful game throwing different sized balls into containers and tallying up their points. They had a great time making sure they were stood behind the line, using their underarm throw and tallying their points as they played.

In Science we explored micro habitats within our school ground and looked for different mini-beasts. We created a tally chart of the different mini-beasts we spotted and used our data to create a pictogram when we returned to class.

We enjoyed creating portraits of King Charles based on pictures of him throughout his life- here are just a few examples of our work.

We used Queen Elizabeth’s crown as inspiration and created our own crowns for our school parade. The children looked closely at the use of the colour purple and gem stones to inspire their own crowns.

We ave enjoyed learning how to code using Scratch Jr. We have learnt how the different codes make Scratch move, grow or talk and how we need a start and end instruction. We also learnt how to join instructions together to create a programme for our Scratch character.

We loved trying to identify different landmarks across the United Kingdom. We tried to pair up the landmark with the country it is in within the United Kingdom. We learnt about the Angel of the North, Edinburgh Castle, the Giants Causeway and Cardiff castle along with many other landmarks.

In Science we went on a hunt in the school grounds to find signs of Spring. We saw lots of things from flowers and trees budding to bees and butterflies. We also discussed things like lambs, foals and tadpoles starting to be born. We then returned to class to write a poem all about signs of Spring.

We loved starting our learning about programming this week with Scratch Jr. This week we started learning about how to control Scratch and how to combine instructions together to create a programme.

We had a brilliant time searching for Easter Eggs in the rain! We all found one and had so much fun at the same time. 

We enjoyed trying some Easter treats. We learnt about the symbolism of the cross on top of the hot cross bun and why Easter eggs are the shape they are. We also made our own Easter birds nest cakes and they were delicious!

During our final cricket session we learnt how to combine our bowling and batting skills into a game type situation. We enjoyed competing to try and get the most points by grabbing the cones after w had hit the ball.

Once again we enjoyed a brilliant visit from the Life Education Bus. We loved thinking about our feelings and how this connects to our body. We also thought about the things we can do to help our feelings and our body to stay happy and healthy.

In Science we loved making habitat dioramas. In Elm a class we focused on pond habitats. We worked hard to include dragonflies, frogs or toads, tadpoles, water lilies, insects, ducks, sea snails, pond weed and many other things to show our learning about pond habitats.

We had a brilliant morning with Wayne and Joe from Broughton Tennis Club! The children loved practising dribbling the ball around their feet, bouncing the ball against the floor and bouncing the ball from the racket into the air. 

We had lots of fun during our cricket lesson this week learning about batting. We combined this with our bowling skills to begin trying to bowl, bat and field the ball.

We had a wonderful visit from The History Man this week learning all about the development of transport!

Elm Class loved World Book Day. They thoroughly enjoyed dressing up and then sharing some of their favourite books with Year 5!

We have loved learning about bowling in cricket. Adam came to teach us all about the skill and we had fun practicing it with the cricket wickets. 

We enjoyed working as a team to create balances and letters with our bodies. Then we worked together to try and remember and sequence of picture cards. We had to help each other remember the order and try and get them all correct at the end of the line.

We looked at pictures of different types of transport from different periods of time. Using these pictures, thinking about what we can see and what we know we sequenced the pictures from oldest to newest modes of transport. Some of us sorted our pictures into transport then and transport now. We used inference to help us with our sequencing.

Spring has sprung and Elm Class have been loving looking for signs around school. So far we have spotted snowdrops, daffodils, buds and leaves forming on trees and butterflies and bees starting to fly around again.

We enjoyed classifying things that are living, dead or have never been alive. Once we had discussed how we know if things are living, dead or never been alive we thought if our own things to classify and added them to our categories.

We had a wonderful trip to LegoLand! We got to enjoy two rides, attempt to build towers on an earthquake table, make structures out of huge bricks, build a seesaw and see how best to balance both sides. It was brilliant! We had such a wonderful day out- we even loved getting to go on a coach.

In Science we enjoyed testing materials for the Jolly Postman’s new post bag. When we had finished our test we wrote a letter to the Jolly Postman to let him know our results.

In English we wrote a set of instructions to teach people how to cross the road. Once we had finished we enjoyed sharing our instructions with Reception Class to help them learn how to safely cross the road!

This half term we explored how school has changed. We were very lucky to have special visits from Mr Topping who spoke to us about our school in the 50’s and Mrs Simpson who spoke to us about school in the 90’s. Miss Kennedy could even help Mrs Simpson because she was at school in the 90’s too! We enjoyed learning about chalk boards, TV’s, uniform and how some different buildings have been added to the school over time!

We learnt about the story of Jesus visiting a wedding and turning water into wine. We discussed times we had been to weddings and things we might have seen there. We decorated cups with some things that you may see at a wedding. We then filled our cups with water and turned it into “wine”. We enjoyed understanding how people at the wedding must have felt when Jesus performed his miracle.

We went for a walk in our local area to identify human and physical features. We saw lots including trees, bridges, stop signs, roads, the church, bushes, cars and a bus!

We practiced using some formal sentence starters to help us write our formal letters. We used “Please understand…”

We began our science lesson by trying to identify the odd one out- each table had a different type of material with one object being made from a different material to the rest, it was a fun way to try and see if we could work it out!

We tested the strength of different structures. First, we tried folding paper in different ways, then we used the different structures and balanced books on top of them to see which structure was the strongest. This helped us to decide what shape we should build our house.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from Elm Class! 

As a class we learnt about the different parts of a plant. We then worked in pairs to make and label our own flowers.

Elm Class are ready, come on England!

Elm Class enjoyed their Walk and Talk for Children in Need on Friday, despite the rain! We loved taking some time out of our busy day to talk about our feelings, times we have been sad or happy and how we like to make others feel happy.

Elm Class supported Anti-Bullying Week by wearing their odd socks!

KS1 loved their visit from Adrian Warrell, the History Man. He came to talk to us about the Great Fire of London. We found out all about how the fire started, how people fought the fire and all about life in 1666. We learnt about how the fire started at Thomas’ bakery on Pudding Lane. We even pretended to be houses ourselves and acted out how the fire spread, plus we tried to put a fire out passing a bucket of water around and getting to pour it on Miss Kennedy! In the afternoon we got to make walls by weaving, just like they used to. We played board games and other games that children used to play and we pretended to put out fires like the Great Fire of London.

We loved creating Stop Motion animations using the iPads, we worked hard and took our time to move our figures just a little bit and then take pictures of them. In the end we added another figure so had to move two at a time. We had to be so careful not to get our hands in our pictures. We really enjoyed how they turned out. 

The children enjoyed completing a conscious alley trying to think of reasons that Leaf should or shouldn’t stay. One group of children were the group of crows and the other group were the rest of the animals, the children came up with lots of creative ideas as to why the crows or animals might want Leaf to stay or leave.

We loved having a look for deciduous and evergreen trees in and around our school grounds. We discussed the differences between the two types of trees and tried to see how many we could spot. We then went back to class to create our own tree identification spotter sheets.

Elm Class loved working as a class to recreate Pudding Lane, where the Great Fire of London started. Together, they built houses out of Lego and placed them close together, they then used tissue paper to recreate the fire starting and spreading down Pudding Lane and destroying the buildings.

We enjoyed practicing our addition and subtraction by playing a game of snakes and ladders. We used cubes to support our working out and enjoyed checking whether our friends had answered correctly!

We had a wonderful visit from Zoo 2 U today. Nathan and Rosie brought a millipede, cockroach, doop (fat-tailed gerbil), tenrec and a snake for us to see. These are all African animals and it was fascinating to hear about animals from a place that we have been learning about! We enjoyed holding and stroking the animals, although some looked a little bit scary at first!

In Science we have enjoyed categorising animals, we tried to think of different ways we could sort animals into two groups!

In PE we have begun to learn about balance, we have tried to slalom with a beanbag on our head! We have also been practising our overarm throw, aiming to get the beanbag in the hoop. Whilst doing all this we have been practising our star jumps in our warm up whilst making sure our bodies are warm and our heart rate is increased!

In Computing we enjoyed drawing self portraits online and signing them with our names. We wrote our names because we know that shows that our pictures are our work and they can't be copied! We have really enjoyed learning about copyright.

We really enjoy getting our faces ready for singing, we try and scrunch them up as small as possible before making them as big as we can! Then we have to try and touch our noses with our tongues. Once our faces are warmed up we enjoy trying to find the beat whilst marching, clapping, patting our heads or shaking our hips!

In PE we have enjoyed learning to egg roll- we call it a pea roll though after the Evil Pea in the Supertato story! We have also been practising our carrot rolls (pencil rolls) and think that we are great!

In Science we enjoyed looking for mini beasts and birds in our forest schools area. When we returned to class we drew some wonderful pictures of the wonderful animals we had spotted!

Elm Class 2021/22

The children worked hard during our art lesson finding lots of different natural patterns and textures to create a rubbing from. We used tree bark, bricks, the fence and our playground to create different patterns before using our rubbings in a repeated pattern with our partners. 

During Art Week we have been focusing on different painting methods. We worked hard to create a beautiful sunset scene over a London silhouette, layering our colours to imitate the sunset examples we looked at, mixing our primary colours together or adding white to create beautiful pinks, purples and oranges. We also created a new stamp to celebrate the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee, we used a splatter painting technique before cutting out the Queen’s head for this piece!

We enjoyed researching crocodiles. We spent a lesson finding out lots of cool facts about crocodiles, we then created a script in our groups so we knew who was going to say which fact. Finally we made our interactive fact files using Thing Link, we had so much fun adding the different features. Follow the links to see a couple more examples… https://www.thinglink.com/card/1583409582800109570 https://www.thinglink.com/scene/1583407038635966467 https://www.thinglink.com/scene/1583403693644972033 

Year 1 did a brilliant job of playing the glockenspiels along with our sign ‘Your Imagination’. The children worked hard on improving their timing and ensuring that as a pair they were playing the correct notes.

Today we built on our previous gymnastic lesson and used the shapes we had practised to create different jumps. We did tuck jumps, star jumps and straight jumps. We even practised them on, off and over different equipment.

We have thoroughly enjoyed looking at the features, reading and performing play scripts this week. Above is just one example of our work, we tried really hard to understand how a play script works and work with our friends to perform them. 

We loved starting our gymnastics lessons today! We practiced our travelling in different ways in a space, including running, monster walks, hopping, skipping and jumping. We then practiced forming different shapes with our bodies including star, straight, tuck, and pike. 

WOW! 19 children achieved their walk to school badge this month, helping to look after our planet and stay active on our way to or from school! We also achieved the most active journeys in school, well done Elm Class ⭐️

Year 1 enjoyed playing the glockenspiels for the first time. We had great fun getting to know the glockenspiels and then trying to play along to the song Round and Round that we have been learning this term.

Elm Class enjoyed making their rockets. We spent lots of time planning our diary entry to make it our best work possible. We are really proud of the results!

Year 1 enjoyed planting a few varieties of peas and broad beans as part of their Science learning. Our planting helped us to write a set of instructions to tell others how to plant seeds. We enjoyed being back in the allotment!