Arrrrrrrrrr!

Pirates!

In Year One we have been learning about Pirates! We met Pirate Pete who has taught us all sorts of things that we would need to know to make good Pirates! 

Pirate Pete sent us lots of non-fiction books and information about being a Pirate! We looked carefully through the information and picked out the most interesting bits and we then created our own non-fiction texts about Pirates. Pirate Pete also taught us about direction and rotation as these are skills he uses a lot when he sails his ship! We have also had to do lots of counting in 2s, 5s and 10s as this is a quicker way to count the gold coins you find in treasure chests! 

When we first starting talking about Pirates we thought that they only collected gold coins and jewels. We have learnt that they also find objects that are useful to them on the ship! We looked at the continents of the world and the oceans and where the Pirates found some of their treasure. 

We have really enjoyed looking at treasure maps and decided we wanted to make our own! We thought about some of the features of maps and designed our own fantasy treasure island. We wrote letters to Pirate Pete to instruct him where he would find the treasure on our islands! We dipped our letters and maps in a mixture of coffee and tea to make them look old!

We enjoyed drawing our treasure maps so we decided to create our own 3D treasure islands using salt dough! We shaped our islands and added features such us lakes, volcanoes, mountains and caves. We left the salt dough islands in the sun to dry out and then we chose the appropriate colours to paint our islands. They look great!

In our independent learning time we had to follow instructions carefully to create this fun parrots! 

We worked as a team to make our own Pirate ship! We started with some paper, paint and a big cardboard box and we were able to create this brilliant ship!

We compared Pirate ships to modern day boats. We found out who Ellen MacArthur is and compared a Pirate ship to the boat she sailed around the world in when she complete the Vendee Globe Race. We thought how brave Ellen must have been to have sailed all the way around the world on her own! She was only 24 years old and it took her 94 days! 

We also compared the types of clothes sailors wore in the past to the clothes they wear now. We even got to try some on...although it was a little on the big side!

In Literacy we have started to look at Poetry and decided to write poems about the beach! Miss Burge brought in a very smelly bag of things she found at the beach which gave us some great ideas for our writing. We looked at the features of acrostic poems and we have really enjoyed thinking of lines for our poems which start with the right letters! 

We created our own tissue paper beach collage to present with our poems. 

Treasure Hunt

Have fun finding the treasure on this activity!

Treasure Hunt

Exciting News!

Hello Year One! I hope you are all enjoying your half term and have tried making some of the delicious foods we learnt about last term! I had a go at making some more pasta at home, it was yummy!

I had an exciting email this morning from a little boy called Sam who has just had an amazing holiday in Argentina! I have posted a copy of his email below so you can have a sneaky peak!

Email from Sam

Fact files from Sam

His email has given me lots of interesting ideas for our learning next week in school! I hope you are as excited as me, some of those animals look ever so funny!


Enjoy the rest of your half term,

Miss Burge

Learn where these foods come from on this game...

Where does food come from?

How Does Your Garden Grow?

We have had a very busy few weeks in Year One! Our 'Growing' topic has been a really big hit in our class and we have all really enjoyed learning and finding out about fruits, vegetables and plants. We started the topic by thinking about what we already know and what we want to find out. We had a fun afternoon exploring different activities to help us come up with questions.

In Guided Reading we learnt about where some fruits grow around the world and we thought about why they grow in different places. We studied fruits closely and then created our own images using pastels. Here is our map of where all these fruits grow!

In Topic we have been learning about what plants need to grow. We have been busy planting flowers in pots in the classroom. We have to have a plant monitor to water the plants each day! We are excited to see what colour our flowers will be. When they are big enough we will move them to our pots outside!

We have also been growing some herbs! Our herbs have been growing really well in the classroom! Can you see which ones have started to grow already?

Outside we have been busy preparing, and planting, in our vegetable patch! We have planted carrots, lettuce and peas! If you look closely you can see that some of them have started to grow already! We have been checking the weather forecast every day to check they have been getting enough water!

In Topic we have also been looking at the different parts of a plant. We have been exploring the leaves of plants by making leaf rubbings and looking in non-fiction books.

We also found an experiment in one of our books we borrowed from the library which we were really keen to try out! The book said we could change the colour of a flowers petals just by changing the colour of the water they were in! We set up our own experiment to see if this was true! If you look closely at the petals in the picture below you can see the petals are just starting to turn pink after only one day!


In Literacy we have been working like busy little bee's to produce some amazing non-fiction posters about the parts of a plant. We worked in our 'Amazing fact finder' pairs to look through lots of information about the parts of a plant and we made notes as we went. When we had lots of information we started to type them up on the laptops. We created a diagram of a sunflower and then stuck our labels around the diagram to create our own non-fiction poster! They look great!

In Topic we have also looked into the work of artist Hermel Alejandre. We really liked the bright colours and abstract nature of his designs! We looked closely at plants and created our own interpretations of his painting!

We hope you enjoy our flans after our assembly - they look delicious! 

Counting in 5's

This week we will practising to count in 5's. Here is a game to help you practise! 

Fairies in the Fog

World Book Day

We had a lovely day today celebrating World Book Day! We came into school this morning and shared our favourite stories and photographs with the class. We then read the story 'How to Grow a Dinosaur' and we have spent the day doing lots of fun activities based on the story! Look at our pictures to see what a fun day we had in Year One...

We had lots of fun playing in the mud! We found things from the garden to create our own dinosaur swamp! 

When we were in the swamp we were using lots of story language to come up with a whole group story about the dinosaurs adventures!

We worked well together to create our stories and our swamp!

We even gave the dinosaurs a bath at the end to clean them! 

We used brush to draw and paint our own dinosaurs...

We worked hard to write our own dinosaur stories!

We made some yummy dinosaur biscuits!

We made some masks so we could act out our favourite dinosaur stories...

And we made some funky dinosaur bookmarks! 

 

 We were writing stories everywhere! 

Just when we thought the day was over we put on our coats and went to read our special books in a special place! We shared our books with our friends and to keep us nice and warm we drank some hot chocolate and marshmallows, and ate our lovely biscuits that we made this morning!

A lovely fun day enjoyed by all. Year One were all superstars today!