Our sponsored Hedgehog Walk

As part of our class fundraising work this year, Year One chose to raise money for the Wildlife Trust by completing a Hedgehog Walk. 

Every evening on average, a hedgehog walks 3km. Our class decided to walk this far over 5 days in a week. We gathered sponsors from our family and friends and each day we walked around either the school playground or the hall. 

By Friday we had completed 3km! 

We are gathering in our money and then we will send our money to the Derbyshire Wildlife Trust so we can help to save our British Wildlife and their habitats. 

DT Day 1

Making a moving storybook

In our first DT day of the year we have been exploring mechanisms, in particular, sliders. The children made a few different sliding items, including a rabbit in a hat and a Humpty Dumpty storybook. The children evaluated their products to see how well they think they did. 

Pictures can be found here.

Active Maths 

In our maths lessons we do a mix of different types of learning. We use resources to help us work out problems and we also like to get active to live and feel the maths. Today we have been learning all about number lines, as appose to number tracks we have been using so far. We started in the class looking at how a number line compares to a number track, what was the same and then what was different. 

We then went outside and put our learning into practice by using chalk to make our own number lines up to 10. Some of the children even carried on after 10! 

The children then solved number problems using their own number lines by jumping onto the answer! 

Yellow Day 2023

Today we wore yellow to raise awareness of how important it is to take care of our mental well-being as well as our physical health. We talked about how no feelings are bad,  but that we do need to talk about how we are feeling to make us feel better and solve any problems. 

Author Visit 9th October

We have been visited today by Wendy Scott who read us her 3 books about Billy. He likes to go on adventures, but are these in his dreams or for real? 

We listened to the stories then we met some of the characters from the books too! We particularly liked the sparkly pants and the tea drinking turtles! 

Geography - Maps and keys

In our geography lesson today we looked at our school playground on Google Earth. We used the aerial or bird's eye view and identified key parts of the environment, such as the trees, the sheds and the huts. 

The children then took a copy of the picture with 3 key features marked. The children needed to look at the picture and work out what the features were and then label them. 

Next, the children had to draw a map of the playground using a simple key. We will use these next week to look at the environment in more detail. 

Science - Our Senses

In our science lesson today we explored our senses. This included learning all about our 5 senses and how our bodies translate information from the body parts. We focused on taste and sight today. 

In our science experiments this afternoon we tried different foods and try to work out which of the five main tastes they came under. We learnt that the side of the tongue is more sensitive so we tried our hardest to move the food around so it touched the sides of our tongues. We then matched the 5 foods to the 5 tastes, sweet, savoury, salty, sour and bitter. Some tastes were harder to put into 1 category than others. 

Our other experiment required us to throw beanbags into a bucket. First we did this with both eyes open; then one eye closed; then both eyes closed. We were exploring how hard it is focus on items when we don't use both of our eyes. 

Art - Lines 

As part of our art lessons we have been exploring the artist Bridget Riley. She creates art work using different types of lines. 

The children looked at some of her art work, thinking about what the art represented and it made them feel. 

We have added photos of our line inspired art work on our art page. 

Geography - Where We Live

As part of our first Geography unit we have been exploring where we live in the world. To help us understand that Newbold is a smaller part of Chesterfield, which is part of Derbyshire, which is part of England, which is part of the United Kingdom, which is part of Europe, which is part of the World; we had a go at being part of this model. 

One child stood in the middle as Newbold. Next we had 2 children surround her as Chesterfield. We continued to add circles of children until we got to England and ran out of children! 

This helped the children to understand that Newbold is part of a bigger place on our planet. 

We finished our lesson by looking at Google Earth and zooming in bit by bit from the wider planet until we found the UK, then England,

then Newbold. 

The children were able to identify the school on the aerial view of Newbold, as well as Stand Road Park and the roads surrounding the

school. Some children then chose to continue to explore the map further until they could see their house!  We even saw one of our

parents stood outside school!

Science - Our Bodies

In our first Science lesson we have been recapping on the work we did in Reception by looking at body part names, such as elbows and knees. 

We then considered the question "Do you have more teeth or toes?"

The children worked with their talk partners to discuss this, even trying to count their own teeth. We then looked at our model teeth and counted together. We worked out that children have 20 teeth before they lose them and get their adult teeth, therefore we have more teeth than toes. 

Finally, we revisited an investigation we did in Reception, drawing around our feet and working out who has the longest feet. 

We made sure that we conducted a fair test by making sure the cut out feet were in a straight line when we compared them. 

Our conclusion was that the oldest child in the class did not have the longest feet and the youngest child did not have the shortest. This means that feet size is not connected with our age. 

First day back

New Year, New Room!

Over the summer the Year One classroom has had a huge overhaul. It has been redecorated and the continuous provision has been redesigned to provide additional opportunities for the children to embed their learning through play and independent exploration. 

Here are some of the photos and a few videos of the new classroom! 

Long-term planning for Year One

Here is the overview for the children's curriculum this year.