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.

Science 

In science, we have been learning about the different parts of our body and what some of those parts do. We drew pictures of our bodies and ladled all of the different parts. We then went on to learn about our senses and which body part they were linked to. We used our senses to classify different fruits. 

Art

The children were very excited to find out that their artwork was going to be displayed in Mansfield Museum! To begin with, they learnt about different artists that created sculptures and discussed their likes and dislikes. They then went on to experiment with different materials that they sculptures could me made from. Almost all the children voted for clay because it dried hard and was easy to manipulate. Next, they learnt how to roll a 'slab', cut, coil and join clay. They also used lots of different tools to experiment creating patterns and textures. Finally, they were ready to design and make their own clay relief tile.  

On Friday 31st March, all year 1 children went to Mansfield Museum to see their clay tile houses on display. Unfortunately, the forecast was awful, so Redfern Travel provided a bus for free to take us down there. We all gathered around, and their exhibition was opened by local radio host, Ian Watkins, from Mansfield 103.2. The children were very excited to see their work on display. They had the opportunity to take a look at each other's work, followed by a drink and biscuit before it was time to head back up the hill to school.  

A huge thank you to Mansfield Museum for displaying their art work, and for all the parents that attended. The children all worked extremely hard and were very proud of the work they produced. 

Well done, Year 1!

Their work will be on display until the end of April in the Buxton Watercolour Exhibition. Pop down and take a took!