Kung Hei Fat Choy!
This term's topic is called "Kung Hei Fat Choi!"
We have been learning about Chinese New Year, which is the focus of this half term's POW Project. This topic mainly has a Geography focus but we will also be doing some Design Technology and we are learning Spanish. We have regular RE lessons, as well as using the computer suite to develop our computing skills.
Geography
We have been learning about weather this half term and we are keeping a class weather chart, as well as discussing weather around the world. What a few weeks of weather we have had since coming back to school....fog, snow, ice, rain, wind, sunshine, all in just three weeks!
We are also learning about hot and cold parts of the world, thinking about what clothes we would need to pack for a holiday to each. Did you know that in some parts of the world it is always Winter? We have learnt that China is so BIG that it has a very varied climate - snowy mountains, hot, sunny beaches and even deserts. Look how much fun we had investigating Miss Hughes's holiday suitcase and deciding which clothes were for hot holidays and which were for cold places!
Can you tell which team is which?
English
In Year 1 (and 2), we have daily Read, Write, Inc. sessions, which focus on developing early reading skills and teaching basic sentence structure and grammar rules. This is supported by daily Speed Sound sessions in the afternoons, where we endeavor to ensure all of our Year 1 pupils know the sounds they need to be confident, fluent readers. We also have a reading comprehension session once a week to make sure our pupils are reading for meaning and understanding texts.
Year 1 also have additional Writing lessons each morning, which we base around a themed text. We use the Talk for Writing principles of ensuring the pupils know a story inside out, by retelling it orally using actions and sequencing pictures with familiar prompts such as who / where / what went wrong / where next / who helped / where last? This develops our pupils' story-telling vocabulary and instills a love for story-telling, which is an essential precursor to writing. They use these texts as stimulus for writing their own stories, either retells of familiar stories or their own versions. We also aim to write about real-life events and experiences.
This term we are using books with a Chinese theme, linked to our topic Kung Hei Fat Choy! Our first text was 'The Great Race' and our next one will be 'The Magic Paintbrush'.
We made predictions, posed questions for character hot-seating and answered comprehension questions about the story.
Design Technology
We have been learning about how Chinese New Year is celebrated and we decided to make dancing dragons. We were challenged to figure out how to make them move and we decided on attaching sticks to them, just like how the Chinese dancers move their dragons. We talked about which colours best reflected the Chinese New Year celebrations and made decisions based on our own ideas.
Have a look at how they turned out...
Chinese Food Tasting
To end our topic on Chinese New Year, we tasted some Chinese food. We were very excited to try noodles, spring rolls and prawn crackers and for a lot of us it was our first time tasting these foods. Can you tell how much we enjoyed them?