The Willow Class adults are looking forward to meeting our new class and hearing all about their adventures over the summer holidays. The adults working with Willow Class this term are Mrs Pring (Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday), Mrs Tompsett (Thursday), Mrs Chavush (Monday morning), Ms Swannell (Monday afternoon), and Mrs Packham (Tuesday to Friday).

This week we will be settling the children back into school and talking about the routines and class rules in Year 1. Most mornings the children will take part in activities linked to our Phonics, English and Maths learning. In the afternoons, the children will take part in learning activities for other areas of the curriculum (including RE, Computing, Art and Science), as well as some play-based activities.

Our English and Art focus for the start of this term is the book ‘The Tree and The River’ by Aaron Becker. This is a wordless book about the fates of a lone tree and a river as the area around them evolves. The river and tree witness the arrival of people, buildings, animals, technology and transportation. This leads to the redirection of the river and the reshaping of the land. This week we will be looking at the illustrations in the book and describing what we can see.

As a school we follow the Twinkl Phonics scheme and this week we will be revisiting the phonemes that the children learnt in Acorn class and checking which letter sounds the children can remember.

On first topic in Maths focuses on the numbers from 0 to 10. This week we will be sorting objects into groups and accurately counting objects in different group.  

In RE, we will be talking about our key question of the term “What do Christians believe God is like?” and this week we will be talking about the word “parable”.

In Science, we will be talking about everyday materials and starting to find objects made from plastic, wood and metal.

This term Willow Class will have PE on Monday morning and Thursday morning. Mr Luckhurst will be leading these lessons.  Please make sure that your child has their full PE kit in school on these days.

We will start to send out reading books from Thursday this week. Ideally all children in Year 1 should be reading at home for at least 10 minutes each day. Please record details of any reading your child does with you at home in their reading record book and let us know when you have finished a book by noting that in the reading record as well.  We kindly request that book bags and reading records are brought in to school every day for the next few weeks.

If you have any questions or need help with anything please contact us using the class email address (willow@st-barnabas.kent.sch.uk).

With best wishes,

Mrs Pring and the Year 1 Team