Welcome to Year 1

Hello I am Miss Arnold, I am a  new to  teacher at Thorn,  I am looking forward to teaching Year 1 and getting to know all of the children.  In Year 1 we have a number of Teaching Assistants to help us to learn including Mrs Halshaw, Mrs Harris, Miss Greenwood, Mrs Lee, Miss Hark and Mrs Tighe.

We have PE on Thursdays and Fridays with Miss Tighe who also teaches us French and Music.  We will be going swimming after the February half term.

Homework is given out on Friday and should be completed and returned to school on Monday.  Home reading books are changed every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

Mrs Knights takes the children to the school library, where they use their fingerprints to check out books, every Tuesday.

We have had a fantastic start to year one and all of the children have settled nicely into our class. We have been learning about ourselves, how we are all the same in some ways and all very different in other ways. We had a lot of fun measuring our height, feet and hands in Science and talking about different animals and their young.

We have been learning to write in sentences and we have been using a lot of exciting adjectives! We used lots of those adjectives in the poems we wrote about Halloween and Autumn.

We have been learning to count money to pay for things and how to give change, so we should all be very good at shopping!

As part of our ‘ourselves’ topic, we have been learning about fruit and vegetables. We were able to try some different fruit and vegetables, and we all made a Halloween fruit salad which we put inside a pumpkin.

The children in year one have been practicing their computer skills in ICT, we are learning to type and use the mouse, add images and text to a document, and have also been taking pictures of ourselves using the laptops.

This term we have been learning about Light and Dark in Science.  We looked at the different sources of light as well as different materials which reflect light.  We designed  some reflective jackets using different materials and colours to help people be seen in the dark.

We have been doing a lot of role play in Literacy to act out traditional tales and we have also written some fantastic stories. We also performed some poems  and wrote acrostic poems which we put inside our Christmas cards.

In Numeracy we have been learning about fractions and time, and will continue to learn to tell the time after the holidays.

The children have been discussing bullying and how to prevent it, we also looked at cyber-bullying in connection with anti-bullying week.

In History we looked at the Great Fire of London 1666 and had a visit from the Lancashire Fire and Rescue Services who showed us the different parts of the engine and explained how fire fighting had changed since 1666.  We also created amazing silhouette paintings of the fire and chalk pictures of typical London streets in 1666.