Velociraptor Blog - Spring Term 1

Date: 14th Feb 2025 @ 9:56am

The time is flying by and we have now reached the half way point of Year 1!  It’s hard to believe, but we have already begun to talk about getting the children ready for Year 2!

All our hard work is paying off.  The handwriting is smaller and neater, the use of phonics is more confident in reading and writing, and the children’s abilities in number have increased hugely.  They are working hard!

We have continued our daily phonics and reading lessons following our FFT scheme and are now seeing the impact as we gradually introduce more independent working, for example on writing sentences by themselves.  The whole idea is that we give them the skills to write correctly first so they do not develop bad habits that are difficult to change.  Please continue to support them with correct letter formation at home so they can eventually be taught how to join up their letters.

In maths, we have been learning number facts involving adding 2, learning how to create “fact families” for each number fact by writing the two additions and two subtractions related to that fact.  Many children can now put this fact family into multiples of 10, represent the fact with different visual models and answer questions involving the fact.  Brilliant progress Year 1!  In addition to all that work, they have been adding and subtracting using a numberline, learning about finding half and one third of amounts and shapes, and learning about telling the time to the hour including drawing the hands on clock faces to show the time.

In history, the children have been studying the history of our own school using various sources such as photographs, the old “accident book”, and interviewing people who came to our school in the past.  Did you know that our own Miss Davis was one of the very first children in our school?

In geography, we have started to study the United Kingdom and where it is in our world.  This work will continue over the two years of Key Stage 1 so that by the end children should know the four countries of the UK and their capital cities alongside understanding its key characteristics and features.  The children have loved learning through songs, Google Earth and interactive games as well as studying world and UK maps.

Science has been exciting too as we have been learning about materials and their properties.  I think the children’s favourite part was our last lesson, which was an investigation into the properties of slime.  As you can imagine, this was messy and hands-on (especially for the poor adults who had to clear up!)

Mrs Gilligan has not only been continuing with her lovely RE lessons, but has had all the children on the new laptops learning about using different progams for data collection.  It’s hard getting 15 laptops ready for each lesson, so thank you Mrs G.!

Whew! Thanks to ­everyone at school and at home - let’s have a rest…

Mrs Nolan and the Velociraptor Team