Welcome!
I am Miss Nicola Jones, the Year 1 class teacher. I am passionate about teaching and learning and aim to make Year 1 a happy, inspiring place that is lots of fun and helps your little ones to grow alongside our Consciousness-based learning ethos.
During the first half term, we ensure that the children’s early learning goals from reception have been met by providing a variety of exciting play-based and discovery learning activities, which not only help the children gain confidence within their new class, but also act as a foundation for the Year 1 curriculum aims. The children will continue to expand on their knowledge of phonics with daily phonics lessons, which are then reinforced with a variety of phonics games, songs and writing opportunities. The children will also take part in several guided reading activities each week, as well as regular 1:1 reading.
There are a range of maths topics that we cover in Year 1, with plenty of practical activities to help engage and develop understanding. We love to sing counting songs and the children will start to use numbers over 20 and learn to count in 2s, 5s and 10s. In addition to teaching the children about shape, fractions and time, we play games which help to teach the children about problem solving, number bonds; counting forwards and backwards and halving and doubling numbers.
We work through a variety of topics in English, which include fiction, non-fiction and poetry. We use ‘Talk for Writing’ strategies for our English topics, which involves a variety of drama, active class discussion activities and sentence rehearsal to help them with their vocabulary development and their writing. We hope to excite and inspire children by using literature that we think that they will enjoy, such as ‘Zog’, ‘Nobot the Robot’ and a topic on ‘Superheroes’ and ‘Nocturnal Animals’.
The children are encouraged to explore the world around them through our topic lessons. In our weekly science lessons (which is Miss Jones’s favourite time!), we will carry out lots of outdoor sensory learning, practical activities and investigations, such as taste tests and observational weather walks. The children will also have an opportunity to be a ‘weather reporter’ for their very own TV show and we have a sunflower growing competition in the summer. We have a Chromebook for each child in Year 1 and the children will develop their ICT skills through the use of ‘Google Earth’ and many ICT learning games such as ‘Teach your Monster to Read’ and ‘Topmarks Maths Bowling’ to supplement their learning.
