Home is Where the Heart is

To begin our topic, the children were asked to bring in pictures of their families. They each shared their picture with the class, talked about their family and drew a picture of the. We discussed that our families love us and care for us. We put all of our pictures together to create a class book. We read the book Home by Carson Ellis and discussed the families in the book and the homes that they lived in. We build homes using different materials from around our classroom.   

PHRSE

This half term we have done a lot of work around homes and families. We used the book 'We are Family' by Petricia Hegarty, to look at how all families are different and unique, and why we need a family. We also discussed that at times families can make each other sad, and who they can talk to if this happens in their home. 

We then used the book Elvis by Shelter, to help us gain a better understanding of homelessness, and the may reasons why people can become homeless.  We used the books The Invisible by Tom Percival and The Day the War Came by Nicola Davies, to help us gain a deeper understanding of what it might be like for a child to lose their home and the different reasons why.  

Our Talking Points lessons also linked in nicely with this. The first book ‘Love is a family’ looked at how all families are different. We learnt that we all have different people in our families. We understand that it is okay if our families look different and how we should respect that.

The second book ‘Under the Love Umbrella’ looked at important people. We made thank you cards to one of our important people for the things they do. Finally, the third book ‘Whoever You Are’ focused on what makes a person. We discussed things that are the same about us and things that make us different.

English 

This half term, we are learning how to write a 'Journey Story'. We are using the tale of The Three Little Pigs to help us. The children have been using a text map to help them orally retell the story. This will then provide them with a structure for writing thier own journey stories. This half term, was are focusing on capital letters and full stops, along with the suffix 'ed' and 'ing'.

Take a look at both year 1 classes performing the story! 

Geography 

Over the last few weeks, we have been learning how to be geographers. We have learnt about human and physical geography, in the counytyside, villages, towns and cities. We then looked at features in our local area of Mansfield. We have also had lots of fun learning about maps! To begin with, we looked at lots of different maps of Nottinghamshire and Mansfield, and then looked at our local surrounding area using Digimaps, Google Maps and Google Street View. The children were fantastic at identifying our school, thier streets and other places they have been to in the area such as Water Medows and the cinema. Using Google Street View, they identified human features around our school, such as the post office, take aways, beauty salons, newsagents and pet shops. They had a practice at drawing a map for the three little pigs (linked to our work in English), before drawing a map of our surrounding area. We used our maps on our walk when carrying out our field work study. We collected information to show to most common types of homes. 

History

We started our history unit by taking a walk into Mansfield to the Museum. We spent a little bit of time looking at the Buxton Watercolour exhibition. This consisted of 130 pictures of Mansfield from over 120 years ago. The children were able to recognise a number of buildings that still existed such as the Victoria Hotel, the town hall, and the viaducts. They discussed similarities and differences of Mansfield now and in the past, drawing on their knowledge of materials from science to support their thinking. We then moved on to compare houses from the past to now.  Some of things the children noticed were chimneys, garages and changes to windows. The children were then fortunate enough to go on a second visit to Sherwood Forest. There, they learnt about the significance of the forest to our local area along with lots of interesting and gory facts about Robin Hood!  

RE - Christianity

Spring 1 

This half term children have been continuing their learning on Christianity. They have been learning to identify when it is easy and difficult to show friendship and to explore when Jesus may have found it difficult. We started off by understanding how to be a good friend. We listened to a story called ‘Say Hello’ by Jack and Michael Foreman. We role-played scenes from the story and talked about how to be a good friend.We moved onto understanding how Jesus showed his friendship through listening to some stories from the bible. (Story of ‘Zacchaeus’, Story of ‘Calming the Storm’ and story of ‘Mary and Martha’). Through these stories we got to understand how Jesus dealt with friendship and how easy or difficult it was for Jesus to show kindness. In small groups we got to freeze frame parts of a story and the other groups had to guess which story the parts were from. We had so much fun!Finally, we ended this term by discussing qualities that make a good friend. We created our own ‘web of friendship’ by passing a ball of wool around and saying why they find it easy to be friends with them.