Spring
World Book Day
Thursday 2nd March
As always, we enjoyed a fun-packed day in school dressed as characters from some of our favourite books. We just love to read and we are learning more and more every day. World Book Day is a celebration which we look forward to every year.
We love books!
Although World Book Day is one special day, we enjoyed a special week in school where we had virtual workshops with famous authors and illustrators. We listened to Julia Donaldson reading one of her books, 'The Baddies' and we watched Alex Scheffler drawing characters from his story, 'The Hare and the Hedgehog.' We also met Simon Bartram who told us all about his book, 'Man on the Moon' and how he loves his job and the thrill he gets from producing wonderful illustrations. One of our favourite parts of the week was learning to draw aliens with Simon. You can see we have some potential illustrators in our class.
What an inspiration all of the amazing authors and illustrators are!
Design & Technology
Structures - Bridges
What fun we had learning about structures during our Design and Technology week!
We learned that structures must be strong and stable to remain standing for long periods of time and that structures sometimes have to hold a great deal of weight to be fit for their purpose. Bridges are strong and stable structures which must hold the weight of people and usually vehicles which use them to cross over water or busy roads and motorways. We were set the task of building our own bridges with materials available in school. In order to carry our the task successfully, we had to research different types of bridges, learn about different techniques which help engineers to strengthen chosen materials, design a model of a bridge with a partner and evaluate our structures once they had been built to see if they were strong enough to hold the weight of our toy vehicles.
You can see the stages of our bridge building below.
Stage 1 - Research
We know that there are different types of bridges like beam bridges, truss bridges, arch bridges and suspension bridges. We know that triangles are very strong shapes which can be seen in many structures. We learned that many bridges are made from strong materials like wood, iron and steel. As we do not have access to these kinds of materials in school, we had great fun learning different techniques to strengthen materials like paper and card. We practiced folding, layering, joining pieces of paper together and rolling card into strong shapes to make these materials stronger.
Stage 2 - Design
We worked collaboratively with our partners to design a bridge that we could make from materials available in school. We planned to use a variety of materials and equipment like card, paper, tape, lolly sticks, paperclips and blue tack. We also planned which techniques we would use to strengthen our models.
Stage 3 - Make
This stage was the most fun!
We made our bridge models from our designs, using the strengthening techniques we had learned and the available materials in school. Along the way, we had to alter some of our designs to ensure that our models were stable and strong. We worked brilliantly with our partners.
Stage 4 - Evaluate
How successful were our bridges? Were they stable enough to stand alone? Were they strong enough to hold the weight of two or three toy cars without collapsing? We tested our bridges together and made adjustments where needed so that they were successful structures.
We are so proud of our bridges!
They are displayed in our Key Stage One corridor for everyone to see.
This week is Children’s Mental Health Week
(6-12 February 2023)
This year's theme is Let's Connect.
This week in Year 1 we have been learning about children's mental health to celebrate and raise awareness of children's mental health week. We talked about ways we can keep our minds healthy and about our connections with other people. We learnt about about how we can connect with others in a positive way and how to keep healthy relationships with others. We discussed our feelings and what makes us feel happy. We then drew our own designs of what happiness looks like to us and what things make us feel happy.
Where in the world do we live?
We are really enjoying finding out about our city of Newcastle upon Tyne and where we are in relation to other places in the UK. We have had fun using atlases to locate our home in the north east of England and how we might travel to other places in the south of England like our capital city of London. Where would you like to visit in the UK? We were excited to find out that in Newcastle, we are much closer to the capital city of Scotland, Edinburgh, than our own capital city.
Materials and more materials
Have you ever wondered what some objects are made from? Why are some materials chosen for a particular purpose and others are not? These are questions we have been asking ourselves in the classroom as part of our science work. We can name and identify common materials around the classroom and the school building and we are now beginning to think about the properties of different materials. Would you wear a pair of shoes made from metal? Why not? Which materials would be suitable to make a pair of shoes from? Which properties would you need the materials to have?
Home Sweet Home
We have read lots of stories about home and why it is so special to us all. Some of our favourite stories have been 'Harry's Home' by Catherine and Laurence Anholt and 'On the way home' by Jill Murphy. We have completed lots of fun activities whilst reading these stories. We have produced story maps, written letters to characters and created new story events following known story patterns to name a few. We can't wait to read more stories together in the coming weeks.
We love numbers!
We have been learning about the numbers from 11 to 19 in some detail over the last two weeks. We are now becoming confident when talking about these numbers using mathematical vocabulary like tens and ones and we love to show off our skills when using various classroom equipment to represent these numbers. We have also worked really hard over the last few days on understanding the number 20. We love numbers!
The World Wide Web
As part of our history work on communication now and in the past, we have learned about Sir Tim Berners-Lee who invented the world wide web. This has been revolutionary in the way we communicate with others and how we find out about the world around us. We had great fun using the iPads to research facts about our favourite animals before copying and pasting some of our findings into Pic Collage.
