News from Key Stage 1

Welcome to a new exciting start in Year 1!  

We started off with Dinosaur Planet which is our first Integrated Curriculum topic. We have been learning about different kinds of dinosaurs, dinosaur body parts, fossils and Mary Anning, a great fossil hunter. Anning inspires all of us with her relentless curiosity and fierce independence. We also went on a dinosaur hunt in the valley to find fossils, dinosaur eggs and dinosaurs!  

In Maths, our focus has been place value. We have learned to express the concepts of one more, greater than, less than and equal to using mathematic language. We feel that the development of language skills should go hand in hand with mathematic proficiency. This month has been a stunning start and we can’t wait to see what October has in store for us. 

Tips on How to Pronounce Multisyllable Words 

We learned that we could classify dinosaurs into three different categories: carnivore, herbivore and omnivore. Young children find these words hard to say because they have many sounds in them. At the same, this is also the reason that they love to learn multisyllable words because they are tricky and therefore, fun. 

When faced with this type of challenge, I always ask my students to build the word from the back. I will use carnivore. 

1) Repeat ‘vore’ three times: ‘vore’, ‘vore’, ‘vore’ 

2) Now, add ‘ni’ in front and say it three times: ‘ni-vore’, ‘ni-vore’, ‘ni-vore’ 

3) Now, add ‘car’ in front and say it three times: ‘car-ni-vore’, ‘car-ni-vore’, ‘car-ni-vore’ 

There you have it! Now you can say ‘carnivore’! 

Year 2 have really been enjoying their first topic of the year; ‘Land Ahoy!’ which is all about pirates! They have studied famous pirates from the past including BlackBeard, Calico Jack and Anne Bonney and created their own pirate puppets! This week, the children looked at the flags that belonged to famous pirates before designing and printing their own. 

The children have also been working on an exciting ‘Pirate Ship’ Art Project which will go on display outside the Primary Art Room! Take a look at their beautiful artwork!  

In English, we have been learning about nouns... things, places and ideas, we also got to differentiate between proper nouns and common nouns. 

We have also been making a proper mess in our maths lessons by having to guess how many water droplets on different size coins, we were all very accurate in our estimation!