Living & Learning: I recognise the importance of sleep
This week in Living and Learning, we have been looking at the importance of sleep.
We thought about all the things we already knew about sleep. We wrote this on the board in red, blue, and green pens. We already knew that sleep was important for both our minds and our bodies. We later went back to this and added our new knowledge in pink.
We heard about a little girl called Mia who struggled to go to sleep one night after a very busy day and rushing straight to bed. We talked about what was good to do before bed and what wasn’t. We sorted things into two piles.
Later, we thought about our bedtime routines and planned a new bedtime routine for Mia. We decided that a super bedtime routine would possibly include:
- screen times going off an hour before bed
- going to bed at the same time each day
- brushing our teeth
- having a story
- staying goodnight to our family
Help at home
Talk to your child about what they find most helpful during their bedtime routine. See if they would like to include something new, if they need it, in their bedtime routine to help them get to sleep.
Topic
We have started out new history topic all about real life heroes. The first important person we’re learning about is Nelson Mandela. You can find more about him here. He believed that everyone should be treated the same. We will be learning about equality, apartheid and the suffragettes.
English
Wow, what a fab start to our Summer term. We have written a recount about our Easter holidays, remembering to use adjectives and conjunctions. Have a look at some of our work!
In English, we have started to read our new book Fantastically Great Women Who Changed the World by Kate Pankhurst. We read about Frida Kahlo and Coco Chanel. We used the dictionary to look up the meanings of some words we weren’t quite sure about and added them to our word wall.
We are biologists!
Biologists study living things, including people, animals, and plants. This half term, Year 1 and 2 will be studying plants.
On Tuesday, we began looking at the different things plants need to grow. We have created an experiment looking at what an onion bulb needs to grow.
We planted four onion bulbs in different conditions. 
We have four environments for our bulbs to grow:
- no light, no soil, no water
- no water, no soil
- no soil
- water, light, soil
After we’d planted them, we made predictions on which bulb we thought would grow the best or wouldn’t grow. Each week, we will be observing our bulbs to see which are growing.
Help at home
Explore plants that you have in the garden or that you see on your walk to school. Observe how plants change over time and talk about what things they need to grow and survive.
Persuasive writing
Yesterday, when the children came to school, they noticed all their chairs had gone! They soon found out that the chairs had gone on strike as they were fed up of not being sat on properly amongst other reasons.
The children had to write a letter to the chairs to persuade them to come back. We shared some of our ideas before writing our letters.
Please come back chairs because you help us to relax and also we like you.
Please come back because if you are here we won’t have to sit on our knees and you help us to concentrate.
Where have you gone?
Please come back so you can help us to do our neatest handwriting.
Suddenly, there was a BANG BANG BANG on the classroom door so we rushed to see who it was!
One of the chairs had come to hear our persuasive writing to see if we could persuade the chairs to come back!
After listening to us, the chairs decided they would return. We were all very happy!
Pirate Bonnie and her swash buckling adventures!
This week, year 1 and 2 were lucky to take an adventure to Wetherby library to meet Pirate Bonnie and hear all about her swashbuckling adventures.
We heard tales of old – of pirates that lived long ago. Pirates who faced adversity and persevered through difficulty to become legendary pirates.
We saw a book that was 300 years old and had pictures and stories about the pirates we had just heard about.
A busy week in Year 1
Yesterday, our books went on stike! In English, we have been using persuasive writing, focusing on conjunctions and questions to persuade the books to let us read them again!
Luckily, we produced some lovely writing and were able to enjoy reading in our reading area again!
In Maths, we’ve been learning how to group by tens and then add on the extra ones.
In Topic, we’ve been planning and creating algorithms and working together to debug any that weren’t working properly.
English
Our class text is Nothing by Mike Inkpen (This is a YouTube link. Top tip for watching YouTube with your child: go to the settings cog along the play bar and turn off autoplay – this avoids an inappropriate clip coming up automatically, and helps to discourage your child from passively watching clip after clip). We have enjoyed reading and sharing our thoughts on the book this week. We picked out some vocabulary that we weren’t familiar with, explored the meaning and added them to our word wall.
Challenge: Can you use any of these words when talking to friends or family?
Today, we looked at the nouns and adjectives used in the book and wrote some expanded noun phrases.
Check out our fantastic writing!
Challenge: Look around you and come up with an expanded noun phrase.
“The orange, chair”.
“The round, yellow table”.
World Book Day
What a wonderful day we have had celebrating reading. We have enjoyed sharing our books with each other and listening to a few stories and books being read aloud by different adults in school.
This morning, we had a surprise visit from Miss Gledhill who read Ping and this afternoon Year 5 and 6 came to our classroom to share stories with us too.
Zooming Julia Donaldson
To kick off world book day, we enjoyed a zoom with Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler. We enjoyed a story about a hare and a hedgehog who were in a running race. Axel Scheffler showed us how he draws the characters. Julia Donaldson then read us a new story about some baddies. The children were gripped!
