Year 1 have been doing lots of creative activities this week linked to Brazil and carnivals.

We made masks for the carnival by sticking feathers, gems and glitter on to our masks. We tried to make the symmetrical.

We made shakers so we could make lots of noise in the carnival. We had to carefully cover our bottle in glue then stick on the colours of the Brazilian flag on to it.

We went outside and created big pieces of art work in the playground by splatting paint onto big sheets of paper. Come and see them in the Year 1 classroom if you get a chance.

We also created some poems. We thought about what we could see, hear and smell at a carnival. We worked really hard to think of good vocabulary to use in our poems.

As part of our topic on Brazil we have been making Piranhas out of paper plates! We had to carefully layer tissue paper on to the plate so you could not see any gaps. They will be displayed in school for everyone to see.

Throughout this year children in Year 1 classes in Nechells and Aston schools have received a free book every month (10 books in total). These books were supplied by the Nechells POD CIC through the Bookshare project , funded by the Smurfit Kappa SSK Foundation.

On Thursday Year 1 attended a celebration at Heartlands Academy.

We heard how each school have incorporated the books into the children’s learning.

Mrs Webster told everyone our favourite book was Stickman.

We enjoyed learning all about Stickman and enjoyed the trip to Sutton Park trying to find Stickman.

We heard stories from the author Steve Smallmann who wrote one of the books we have been given, ‘Batmouse’

Steve Smallmann also illustrates books and he drew us a picture using our ideas.

For the last two weeks year 1 have been looking at instructions in literacy. It’s been a really enjoyable couple of weeks and we have had plenty of chances to carry out and write our own instructions. Some of the instructions we’ve looked at have included making sandwiches and inventing our own game. Check out the pictures below to see the fun we had!

In RE this half term, year 1 are learning all about Hanukkah, which is a Jewish celebration. To start our learning, we spent this week’s RE lesson learning about different types of celebrations and how people celebrate.

After looking at different celebrations we had a special visitor and we used what we had learnt to help them celebrate their birthday.  Can you guess who our visitor was from the pictures below?

Year One and Year Two had the opportunity to watch and take part in a workshop run by Language Alive. They retold the story The Selfish Giant by Oscar Wilde.

We were pretending to be the children in the story.

We were helping to tell the story by recreating winter.

Year One have been exploring capacity.

We invited our parents into the classroom to see what we have been learning about.

We were looking at the language of capacity including empty, nearly empty, half empty, half full, nearly full and full.

We used the laptops to explore which container held more water.

We used our problem solving skills and the new language we had learnt to see whether we could put the glasses in the correct order.

We really enjoyed measuring capacity using a cup as a non-standard measure. The children loved pouring the water into the cups.

Year One have been looking at a story called Little Charlie. In literacy we have been writing our own stories based on Little Charlie.

We first told the story using a story map to help us.

We then decided on how we are going to change our story.

We worked together to draw story maps.

We worked really hard to change every element of the story.

We then retold the story using puppet.

We enjoyed drawing and cutting out our puppets.

We have used these ideas in this weeks big write.

In Year One we have been looking at our topic memory box.

We have been sharing memories of when we were babies.

We practised writing the sentences on whiteboards, remembering to use our capital letters, full stops and finger spaces.

Then we were allowed to use pen to write our sentences on leaves.

We then made a memory tree from our leaves as a display in our classroom.