History Topic – The Great Fire of London
This week, we have been learning about Samuel Pepys. We thought about why he was so important to the people of London during the fire. The children were all very enthusiastic and could explain their thoughts.
“He went to the king and asked him for help. The king ordered the houses to be pulled down. This helped save some of London.”
We also talked about why Samuel Pepys is important to people wanting to learn about The Great Fire of London.
“His diary helps us to know what happened!”
“His diary gave us lots of information about The Great Fire of London.”
“Told us what people had to do to get away from the fire.”
After, Year 1 and 2 worked together to read some different scenarios and they had to decide what they would do in each situation.
“I would get all my gold and dig a hole and bury it, then I would leave.”
“I would wake up my family up really quickly and go out of our house, hide our things and go to a new, safe place.”
“I would see if anyone needed my help to try and stop the fire.”
Challenge: Why not read a scenario to your child and see if they can tell you what they would do and why.
Microhabitat hunters
In our science lessons, we have been learning all about living things and their habitats.
We went on a microhabitat hunt around our school to see if we could find any microhabitats and who or what was living there. We found many creepy crawlies hiding under a log including woodlouse, centepedes and worms.
Writing – The Great Fire of London
We have been enjoying learning all about The Great Fire of London. (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 loved imagining what it would have been like to have been alive during the Great Fire of London. We used the senses word mat to think about what we would have heard, seen, smelt and touched.
When writing, we turned the lights off in our classroom and listened to a roaring fire to get a feel of the sounds we might have heard from the burning fire.
Afterwards, we thought about how we would use our senses words within a sentence.
“I would hear people shouting and dogs barking,” said Joshua.
“I would get all my things from my room and run outside,” said Jack.
“I would feel sweaty and hot,” said Florence.
“The houses burnt because they were made from wood and were dry from the hot summer,” said Lily.
“They made a firebreak to stop the fire spreading,” said Cameron.
We thought about how we know all the information we do about the Great Fire of London because Thomas Farriner isn’t alive today to say if it was or wasn’t his bakery on Pudding Lane where the fire started. We looked at old newspaper clippings, pictures, maps and diary entries. We have particularly focused on Samuel Pepys diary. All of these artefacts tell us information about what it was like and what people did.
Ask your child to tell you three facts about the Great Fire of London.
PE
We’ve been working on our ball skills in our PE sessions. We have been throwing and catching and bouncing and catching. The children have all wowed us with their ball skills.
Living and Learning: I use good manners
This week, our Living and Learning has been about using our manners.
What are manners?
Manners are words and actions that we can do to help us be nice and respectful to others. It is important to be polite and use our manners whenever possible.
We looked at some pictures and talked about what good manners might be happening.
“The boy is saying please can you pass me the salt and pepper,” said Bea.
“The person that dropped their apple might say sorry for bumping into the girl carrying the books,” said Orianne.
“The girl with the chocolate cake might say thankyou for sharing the cake,” said Joshua.
We thought about how we use our manners in school and at home.
“We say thank you the Julie when she serves us our lunch,” said Lily.
“I say thank you to my brother when he shares his toys with me,” said Hattie.
“I say please when I want to join in with my friends game,” said Max.
We also watched and listened to the story How Rude a a story about manners.(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.)
Challenges
In our classroom, we have lots of challenges linked to our learning. We have a Maths, Reading, Writing, Phonics, Science and Topic challenge. Each child has a challenge chart and all week during choosing time we work hard to complete the challenges and tick them off on our challenge chart. Every Friday we spend some time as a class talking about the challenges. We had lots of certificates today for lots of super learning! Well done, keep it up Year 1!
Reading Records
Today, the children will be bringing home their new reading records. Please write a comment about your child’s reading in the parent comments section and bring the reading record back to school every Wednesday. We will send the reading record back home again on a Friday. Your child’s new e-book will be issued on a Friday.
History topic – The Great Fire of London
We have started our topic and we are learning all about The Great Fire of London. We are using a book, Vlad and the Great Fire of London, to stimulate our learning. (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 started by talking about the topic vocabulary, which you can see below. Help your child at home by exploring the information on the BBC bitesize website.
Look at our amazing learning. These are all the key facts we already know about the Great Fire of London!
Library
Year 1 will be visiting the library on a Thursday. We enjoyed our first session yesterday. The children choose their ‘love of reading’ book to borrow. Please bring these books back on a Thursday to change.
We looked at the books we had chosen and noticed that some children had chosen fiction book and some children at chosen non-fiction books. We talked about what this meant.
Fiction: a made up story.
Non-fiction: a book that gives facts/ real information.
Why not have a look through your books at home and see if you can group them into fiction and non-fiction books.
Maths
This week, we’ve had some ‘naughty numbers’ in our classroom. The numbers were all mixed up and we had to get them back into the correct order. The children worked together to see where they needed to be in the giant number line. We used some great language such as more, less, smaller, higher when deciding where we needed to be.
Why not count forwards and backwards at home? Starting from 0 to 10 and backwards from 10 to 0. Can they count from any given number e.g. 7 to 10 or 6 to 0?
