Year 1

Welcome to Year 1!

Year 1 is an exciting year as the children move from Early Years to Infants. We work hard in Year 1 to introduce the children to an environment of more formal lessons throughout the day whilst having lots of fun at the same time.

We have a strong focus on Reading and Phonics in Year 1 and expect all children to read at home everyday. This really helps our children develop not only their reading skills, but also supports their writing development. Our children also bring home Tricky Bingo Games each week which help them to learn new spellings to support their writing development.

We use a 'Talk for writing' approach to our English lessons which helps us to internalise the story using actions and a story map. We then innovate on the story to make changes and also have a go at short bursts of daily writing to help improve our skills.

We enjoy using lots of resources in Maths to help us to count forwards and backwards, add and subtract and also look at place value and tens and ones within a number. We use counters on a tens frame, number lines, rekenreks and other resources to help us learn practically. As part of our daily math lessons we use a range of skills to discuss, understand and solve problems.

We enjoy topic lessons which help us to answer a weekly question and also develop our skills in a wide variety of areas such as History, Geography, Computing and Science. In Year One we enjoy the following topics : Do all superheroes wear capes? , Where do big cats live? , How do we know Birmingham and London are cities?, What is a British woodland like? and How do the seasons change?

Here at Elms Farm we have named our classes after inspirational historical figures. In the first weeks of Autumn Term children will learn all about their class namesake. Seacole class is named after the heroic nurse Mary Seacole who braved the terrors of war to save injured soldiers. Cadbury class is named after local entrepreneur and chocolate factory founder John Cadbury.

Year One Team : Mrs Shenton, Miss Lovell and Miss Smith