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Plant Puzzles

We had a puzzling afternoon on Friday.  There was a challenge given to the Year 1 children – they were given seven pieces of a beanstalk.  Their challenge was to create a beanstalk as close to a metre as possible but they were only allowed to use five pieces altogether.  This was not as easy as it looked!

Where does our food come from?

Lots of our food comes from plants.  We are hoping to make something to eat using home grown produce.  Along with tomatoes, peppers, lettuce and courgettes, we also planted some herbs and different flowers.

Class photograph

A quick reminder that the photographer will be in school on Tuesday morning to take our class photo – smiles at the ready!

What’s happening this week?

Our plant topic continues and we’re starting to see the fruits of our labour.

This week, we’ll see our plants moving outside into planters so see if you can spot them and see how they’re progressing.

Maths – As we’re watching our plants grow, we’re going to practise our ruler skills so that we can measure the height of our plants and continue doing so as they grow. Additionally, we’ll be looking at temperature. When do we measure temperature? How does temperature change throughout the year? How does temperature affect us and the world around us? We shall also look at reading scales on thermometers which will involve our being introduced to negative numbers.

English – After two weeks of writing non-fiction, our creative juices will be flowing again as we take on the character of The Hungry Caterpillar and perform, discuss and write poetry. Help at home by talking about poems you know or like and seeing how much of it you can learn and remember.

12 June 2015

This week’s homework is Practice Makes Perfect and is due on Wednesday 17th June 2015.

I can write an algorithm.

Can you used the key words to write an algorithm (set of instructions) to get from start to finish, passing through all of the stages of plant growth in the correct order? Use a counter, toy car or Playmobile figure to help you by moving them through the grid, thinking about the instructions they would need to be successful.

Planting and more planting

So far in our new topic, Green Fingers, Year 1 have been getting their hands dirty.  We’ve been following instructions for planting cress seeds and broad bean seeds and also planting a range of vegetables, herbs and flowers.  It’s been great to hear that so many of the children are growing some of their own plants at home.

What do plants need to grow?  This was a question we considered this week and we set up some experiments to test this.

As we continue to work on our writing targets in English, we’ve been writing descriptions of plants.   This is also helping us to remember the names for the different parts of plants.

We’ve also been reading stories about plants – Jack and the Beanstalk, Jasper’s Beanstalk and Tiny Seed.  Are there any other books about plants that you can think of?

Finally, here is our best crop so far!

12 June 2015

All the spellings this week contain the letter string ough. It’s important to practise reading these words as well as writing them down as there are a variety of sounds that the ough words can make.

The sound which the ough word make are shown in bold in the list eg ‘uff‘.

12 June 2015

The homework this week is talk time and is related to our SEAL theme: changes.

I can change my learning / behaviour for the better.

Children should talk at home about what they can do to improve either their learning, behaviour or both.

Getting into position

In our latest session with Dan from Leeds United we looked at where to position ourselves to receive a ‘ball’. For a change, we used balloons to test this.

12 June 2015

This week’s spellings are nouns (singular to plural).

For some of the words, you have to drop the y and replace it with an ies in order to pluralise the word. Can you spot any other spelling patterns or rules in these words?