Author: Mrs Taylor

Tomorrow, Friday 13 November, is Children in Need.

It will be a non-uniform day for a donation towards the charity.

Our recent Living and Learning focus has been all about mental health.

In Year 1, our learning has included:

• exploring and understanding different emotions
• identifying good and not so good feelings
• learning about ‘big’ feelings

This video introduced a variety of emotions. Emotions are feelings. They can change all the time. We all experience a whole range of emotions, from anger to happiness to fear.

We used clues to help us be emotion detectives. Looking at the character’s face as well as their body language helped us to decide which emotion the characters were showing.

We used these sentence starters to share when we might feel certain feelings to help us understand the reason for these emotions. As well as sharing this orally, we wrote some sentences too.

I feel excited when it is my birthday.

I feel happy when I go to the park.

I feel angry when someone doesn’t share with me.

We recognised that sometimes we might have a not so good feeling or a big feeling and we might need to talk about these emotions with someone we can trust – a friend or an adult at home or at school.

Self care techniques can also help us to look after our own mental health.

We were very proud of the children’s self care/wellbeing bingo homework and we hope they continue to make use of these techniques.

Staying hydrated…

Reading a good book…

Finally, further information about mental health can be found on the Public Health England (PHE) ‘Every Mind Matters’ website providing NHS-endorsed tips and advice to help children and young people’s mental wellbeing and equip parents and carers with knowledge to support them.

All the Year 1 staff are very proud of the all children in their first half term. They have adapted well to the new procedures and they have amazed us with how well they are taking responsibility with their learning and routines.

Also, it was great to catch up with so many parents at the online parent-teacher consultations last week.

From these conversations, here are a few reminders to share.

• If the children have read their reading book, they can change it by putting it in the book return box, at the cloakroom door, on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
• Library is on Mondays and the children can take out a new book if they have returned their current book. It is helpful to keep their library book in their named folder if possible.
• It is great to see how well the children are engaging with Lexia at home. Some of the children are already reaching the end of the Year 1 learning (Level 5) and we would like these children not to progress any further at home as this will move onto Year 2 learning.

For next half term, here’s some information about the children’s learning.

• PE will continue to be on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We will aim to be outside where possible so please ensure your child wears their outdoor kit.

• As you will have seen, we’re excited to start our history topic all about the Great Fire of London.
• We have enjoyed our science learning about habitats and the environment and animals including humans is our next area of learning. There are some very knowledgeable scientists in the class! The BBC website is a great source of information that you could look at home.
• Our Living and Learning focus will continue to be on the theme of relationships. The children have made some great contributions in this learning.
• In maths, our focus will be on addition and subtraction. We’ve also been enjoying the BBC Super Movers videos in class as brain breaks.
• In phonics, we will soon have completed our revision of the Phase 3 sounds. Here are some phonics games you could try at home.

• Spellings will continue to be checked on a Friday and the children do see their spelling results after they have been marked. As this remains at school, please ask your child how they have got on.
• In writing, we continue to focus on what is a sentence. The four reminders we use in class are:

1. Capital letter at the start
2. Full stop at the end
3. Finger spaces
4. Does it make sense? Reread your sentence.

• We will continue to read a variety of fiction including poetry and non-fiction texts in class including our weekly fluency text. We read this daily to develop the children’s reading skills including using their phonics knowledge to help them read new words, understanding different vocabulary, taking account of punctuation and even starting to use some expression.

Thank you for all your support over this first half term and please do get in touch if you need any support with your child’s learning.