On Monday, Year 1 received a letter from Chester Zoo. The Zoo was asking for help from the Year 1’s helpful children. An animal had escaped and they needed to find out what animal it was. We explored different groups of animals and found out that the animal that had escaped was a mammal. We know that mammals are warm blooded, have hair or fur and give birth to their young. Miss Tsang found the animal hiding in the playground, it was a baby panda! We needed to find out how to look after it, so we read and researched about Pandas and wrote our facts into super sentences. We used our fantastic phonics knowledge and remembered our capital letters, finger spaces and full stops.

In Year 1, our Talk for Writing story is the Owl Babies. The children have enjoyed re-telling, role playing and writing the story of the Owl Babies. We know this story really well, so we decided to change the characters in the story. As a class we decided to change our characters to a family of monkeys. Our main character was changed to a baby monkey called Steve. We created a story plan and enjoyed using an app on the ipad called Puppet Pals to re-tell our story.

In Geography this term, Year 1 are learning about our local area. We have been thinking about the different things we have in the area of Nechells. We used an internet app to see a map and explore our local street view. We found where we live and some human features in our area such as the shops we go to and our school. We know that human features are built by someone. Today we were extremely lucky to have a visit from Roy Slim who used to live in Nechells many year ago. We asked him clever questions about what Nechells was like and found out lots of facts!

This week, we were lucky to have our parents join us in our classroom for Year 1’s maths workshop. We were able to show our parents the clever learning we do at school. We have continued our learning about measure and were able to measure in a range of ways.

How tall is Mia’s mummy?

This week in maths, we have been looking at measuring in Year 1  We have been focusing on measuring length. We have been using the language of measure to compare lengths and have explored measuring in a range of ways.

We have especially enjoyed taking part in a range of problem solving activities.  We were set a problem and worked in our groups to resolve the problem.

We had to measure an owl using cubes and then made a house to fit the owl inside it. We were able to work as a group to measure and discuss how the owl would fit in the house.

This week in Year 1, we had a special visitor in our classroom. We were lucky to be greeted by Bailey and his owner. They were sat on Miss Tsang’s chair! We were extremely excited and eager to find out why there was a dog in our classroom. They had come from Dog Trust to teach us about looking after dogs. Bailey’s owner told us a story and we were the actor and actresses of the story. We did an excellent job! We now know how to care for animals, and we have decided to turn our role play into a Vet surgery to look after all of the sick animals.

Year 1 received a new article explaining that Autumn has been cancelled this year. We decided to explore this further, we spoke about what we knew about Autumn and read lots of non-fiction books to find out more information. We were worried about Autumn not appearing this year, so we wanted to ask for help to find Autumn. The children decided to write Missing poster to ask for help.

Look at our fantastic independent writing!

We then became Autumn detectives and  went for a walk around the  school grounds to see if we could find any signs of Autumn. Take a look at what we found!

What can you find? Has Autumn really been cancelled this year?

What have you noticed about this time of the year?