Year 1
Rights Respecting Articles in Child Friendly Language
The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go.
- Dr Seuss
In Year 1, our vision is to create a warm, nurturing, and joyful learning environment where every child feels safe, valued, and confident to take their first steps in formal education. We aim to establish strong routines and positive relationships that build trust and a sense of belonging, laying the groundwork for future learning success.
Our vision is to prepare Year 1 students to become confident, enthusiastic learners with a love of learning, ready to thrive in Year 2 and beyond.
Meet the team
Miss Bedeau - Year Lead
Miss Granger - Class Teacher
Mr Harrison - Class Teacher
Support Staff - Miss Oliver, Miss McCloud and Ms Seher
What we do and when
Curriculum maps will be uploaded each half term.
Our learning
Autumn Term
This term in our history journey, we are exploring our local area and answering our big question of ‘How has our local area changed over time?
In our English and reading this half term, we have started by exploring the book More than Words, our new whole school text. The text tells us how different people communicate!
In art, we started the year by having a go at a self portrait. We experimented with sketching techniques first and then completed a self portrait thinking about shape and proportions after looking in the mirror.
Previously...
We have been reading the book ‘’The Bog baby” by Jeanne Willis. We learnt to write instructions and a recount on our walk to Tooting Common when we went in search of Bog Babies! We stopped to enjoy the park.
We have started the Wandsworth Singing Project and our tutor is called Anya. The children are enjoying learning the different songs. This year the theme is “Pirates” We will perform all the songs for you on Wednesday 2nd July at 2pm at the Mitcham Lane Baptist church.
In RE this half term we learnt about Sikhism. We learnt how Sikh’s give to charity. We re-created a Langar like Sikhs do at the gurdwara. We brought in some food to share and we discussed what it means to share and be kind.
On Thursday we had the wonderful opportunity to visit an allotment. We felt like we were in the countryside. We enjoyed learning about the different plants and we even had the opportunity to plant our own sunflower seed. We also went on a plant hunt whereby we had to find different plants such as lavender, rose bushes, parsnips, tulips, bean plants, garlic to name a few. We looked at the water tank and found a big spider hiding under it. Another lovely aspect was learning about how bees are so important to our environment. We could view the bee hives from a safe distance.
During Children’s Mental Health Week. We invited Chloe from Place2Be to share the story, ‘I like bees. I don’t like honey” with us. This book celebrates that we are all unique and also through rhyme helps us to understand we all have likes and dislikes.
The theme this year is ‘Know yourself. Grow yourself.' We created Art work garden of our likes and dislikes. This is going on a display in our classroom.
In Year 1 the children move away from a free choice play based curriculum and are taught from the National Curriculum. To ease our children into the new academic year, we will have an extended transition period within Year 1 during the first half of the Autumn term. We have set up our classrooms to look and feel like the reception classrooms which will allow the children free choice alongside the teaching of the Year 1 curriculum.
We are enjoying free choice and play based learning as well as learning to write in our new books this half term.
As part of our diverse curriculum we focused on Ella Fitzgerald for Black History Month. We learnt about her life and how she used our core values of courage and resilience to overcome obstacles and succeed. We created art work inspired by her quote, "It isn't where you came from, but where you are going that counts."
In science we are learning about labelling basic parts of the human body.
In computing we explored line and shape on paintz.app to create digital pictures.
In history we went on a walk around our local area and compared photographs of the past and present of streets surrounding our school.
We answered the question “How has our local area changed over time? and visited Graveney School where we learnt some interesting facts about Furzedown House. We sat in the orangery where the Seely family used to grow oranges and pineapples. We enjoyed seeing the large doors at the front of the house. Sir Charles Seely had larger doors installed because he liked to ride his horse all the way to the main staircase.
In RE we learnt about Islam. It was lovely that both our staff and pupils could share with us their experiences of Islamic celebrations. On Wednesday, we had Imam Zahir visit us at school to teach us about Ramadan and the festival of Eid which was then followed by our Eid Bazaar.
How can you help at home?
Please read with your child 5 times a week. Children will take home a phonics reading book and a class book. Please record any reading at home in your child’s reading diary. Reading books will be changed on Mondays and Thursdays.
Useful websites:
- ICT Games - Fun and exciting maths and literacy games available.
- BBC Maths - A BBC website with all maths topics covered.
- Mad 4 Maths - Fun maths games for children and advice section for parents - good for higher ability KS1 children and times tables practice!
- Maths Zone
- BBC Literacy
Join our community
Do you have skills, knowledge and have lived experiences that could be beneficial to our pupils at Penwortham? For example, you may be a practising Buddhist or be of the Windrush generation. Your line of work may involve promoting sustainable living (for example) or you may have links to people who would be happy to run professional development sessions for members of Penwortham Primary School.
If so, please sign up to the Penwortham community!
Thank you