Autumn 1
This half term we have been rather busy. We have been reading ‘Dear Greenpeace’ and wrote them letters and created fact files about whales.
Maths has been all about place value, looking at the importance of numbers, their order, tens and ones and comparing numbers and objects. Animals, including humans has been our focus in science. We have learnt about what they need to grow, offspring, classifications, diet, senses and our bodies.
In history, significant explorers have been our theme. We now know a lot about Christopher Columbus, Matthew Henson and Ellen MacArthur, especially after our Christopher Columbus trip.
In RE, we have focused on festivals, looking at those celebrated by a range of faiths, in particular Diwali. PSHE has been all about similarities and differences between ourselves and others, embracing ourselves and our uniqueness.
We have explored a range of artists in our colour chaos topic in art – Piet Mondrian, Mark Rothko and Wassily Kandinsky to name just a few.
Our class book this term is ‘The Twits’. We have absolutely loved it so far! We have also started our continuous provision journey in KS1, so children have been busy completing a range of challenges and participating in activities that consolidate their learning.
Autumn 2
This half term we have been as busy as ever! We have been learning all about poetry. Our main focus has been on acrostic and shape poems. We had a visit from the poet Andy Tooze and learnt lots of great skills form him. We wrote acrostic poems about Bonfire Night and Remembrance Day and shape poems about Autumn and Christmas. Maths has been on addition and subtraction using a variety of methods such as part whole in year 1 and the column method in year 2. Year 1s have been looking at number bonds to 10 and fact families, whereas year 2s have been learning about checking calculations using the inverse operation and adding three 1-digit numbers. In science, we have been continuing on with our animals topic but this time focused on diet, health and growth. We learnt about nutrition, exercise, hygiene, immunisations and life cycles. Geography was this half term and we learnt about our world. We looked at continents, oceans, the Equator and hot and cold places (climate). In RE we had the key question ‘Why does Christmas matter to Christians?’, so we learnt about Christmas as a Christian, the significance of light, advent, Christingles and the Nativity. We finally finished our class guided reading book of ‘The Twits’ and absolutely loved it! We created missing posters, drew escape plans, made newer predictions for the ending to see if they had changed from the start and took part in a team quiz.
