Blackfell Primary School

Literacy - The Gingerbread man

In literacy, we have been focusing on the story ‘The Gingerbread Man’. We have been using a story map in every lesson to help us tell the story. This helped us to create a drama performance based on the key events, in order to tell the story. Here are some pictures from it. We hope you like it!

P.E - Fitness

In P.E, we have been learning about how exercise makes us feel. Some of the activities we have done are assault courses, balancing on one leg and seeing how far we can jump We have lots of fun!

World Book Day

To celebrate world book day, children in year 5 came to our classroom with a story each and read them to us. Throughout the week, Miss Richardson had been reading us stories given to us by the reading warriors, all which had a different colour of the rainbow. Today we each completed a book review about one of these books. We wrote a sentence about why we liked this story and drew the front cover. We have had lots of fun!

Snow Fun!

We made the most of the March snow, got wrapped up and went outside. We built snowmen, had snowball fights and made snow angels!

Literacy - Reading our published stories to reception

On our final day of spring term, we finished publishing our own book, which was our own version of Handas Surprise. We visited reception to share these stories, as they are very familiar with the story Handas surprised. They really enjoyed listening to our story and looking at our illustrations.

Maths - Number bonds to 10

In year 1, we have started a new topic in maths which is place value within 20. To know numbers to 20, we need to be confident with numbers to 10 and different ways to make 10.  We carried out a practical lesson to help us understand all of the ways to make 10, using different resources. We worked in partners using red and yellow counters and tens frames, to see how many different ways we could make 10 and wrote them on our whiteboards. This is called our number bonds to 10. 

PSHE - Mental health week 

In PSHE, we talked about what mental health was and worked in pairs to write down as many different feelings as we could think of. We drew pictures of things we do to cheer up and made a chain with them!

DT-Playground equipment!

Today we began to explore different ways of joining and strengthening materials to create pieces of playground equipment. Miss Brooks explained that it is very important that whenever you design a product it needs to be suitable for the purpose you are designing it for. We discussed questions like… What do you think the designer of these swings was thinking about when he/she designed it? Why is there tyres underneath the end of a seesaw? Why is the base the biggest part? We discussed each piece of playground equipment in the same way. We found out the main reasons the designer was thinking about was safety and to make the  equipment strong and safe to use. We used reclaimed materials and joined together features of playground equipment using things like pipe cleaners, sellotape, glue, staples and string. We found that some of the materials we used were not sturdy enough and we tried hard to strengthen them. We are going to build on our problem solving skills over the next two lessons to improve our models.

What a great start Year 1!

Art - Aboriginal art

Our topic in art is printing patterns, and in our most recent lesson we learnt about a style of paintings which originated from the Aborigines in Australia. This printing technique includes lots of dots to create a colourful picture. We listened to a story called the ‘Rainbow Serpent’ story and followed step by step instructions to paint this creature. We used cotton buds and bright colours to create our Rainbow Serpent. 

Maths -  Subtract by finding the difference

In maths, we looked at subtracting to find the difference. Miss Richardson put us into pairs, with challenge cards and cubes. Together we had to make both numbers with cubes and then subtract the smallest number of cubes to find the remaining number. We then wrote this subtraction sum on our whiteboard and asked Miss Richardson to check it.

Literacy - Fruit Tasting

This week in literacy, we have been looking at our new story Handas Surprise. In this story, Handa has 7 delicious exotic fruits which she was taking to her friend. We used our senses to describe mangos, bananas, pineapple and passionfruit. We really enjoyed trying new things!

DT- Our final piece of playground equipment!

We used our designs to create a final piece of playground equipment. We thought about the skills we learnt in lesson two before constructing our new piece of equipment. We considered... Which materials would work best for our structure and why? How can materials be attached to each other? Will your structure move? Can we work together safely and use simple tools? Can we add colour to make the equipment look exciting for the people using it? We worked hard as a team and tried hard to use appropriate materials, ensure our structure was sturdy, safe, colourful and suitable for the purpose it was designed for. We had so much fun making our playground equipment! Finally we wrote in speech bubbles to evaluate our structures.

Take a look at our final piece of playground equipment. Well done Year 1! They look amazing!