Year 1 - Autumn Term 2021!

Autumn 2021 - Dinosaur Planet

Stomp, crash, roar! Watch out – there are dinosaurs about! Yes, that’s right, we’re travelling back in time to the age of the dinosaurs.

This half term, we’ll visit a museum, look closely at ancient fossils and study reptiles to understand how dinosaurs may have lived and eventually died out. We’ll learn about the great fossil hunter, Mary Anning, and follow in her footsteps, studying dinosaur teeth and bones to find out what dinosaurs liked to eat. Learning dinosaur names, creating puzzling riddles, writing fantastic fact files and creating exciting dinosaur stories are some of the other activities we’ll be involved in this half term. We’ll also use our artistic skills to make model dinosaurs and to design dinosaur landscapes.

At the end of our project, we’ll invite you to a dinosaur party to share our knowledge with you. We’ll invent some dinosaur games to play and entertain you with our wonderful dinosaur music.

Help your child prepare for their project
Dinosaurs are fascinating! Why not visit the library, choose some dinosaur books and practise reading and writing dinosaur names together? Alternatively, research amazing dinosaur facts together online. You could also make a mini Jurassic Park from cardboard boxes and craft materials to make model dinosaurs feel at home!

PE

Our PE days are Monday afternoon and Thursday morning, please send children in PE kits on these days.

Forest Fridays

Please make sure children wear suitable clothes, shoes and a waterproof coat every Friday. 

Homework

We will set tasks via purple mash for phonics homework every week and via active learn for maths to help support and consolidate what your child is learning in school. Please also encourage your child to practice writing their name correctly and practice writing the alphabet in both lower case and capital letters and numbers to 100.

Please also see the attached list of home learning activity ideas.

Reading

Please read with your child every night and record in their reading diary every day. There are lots of ideas attached on the letter to make reading more fun and enjoyable.

Reading at home

Please encourage your child to read every day at home.  Many children have been out of a regular routine over the last few months and it is important that we all work together to help them catch up as much as possible.

Your child will be sent home with an appropriate reading book suitable for them.  If your child feels their reading book is too hard you can encourage and support them in different ways to build confidence.

• Make reading fun!
• Praise all efforts, no matter how small.
• Act out the story; add actions to the words, use different voices, add expression to your voices. You could even make puppets of the characters.
• Encourage your child to sound out the words to help them read it. If they get it wrong it doesn’t matter, just help them by saying the sounds or the words correctly.
• Take turns reading the sentences / pages.
• Read the same book repeatedly every night for a few days / week. By repeatedly reading the same story, your child will build up their confidence and think ‘I can read this’ and be more fluent through word recognition.
• Can they point out the tricky words? (the words that are not spelt phonetically – children have to learn to read them by sight eg. The, my, go etc
• It is not always necessary to read the whole book, just 5 minutes a day reading a few pages is better than nothing. You can continue where you left the following day.
• Above all, if your child is reluctant to read, simply read it to them and make it an enjoyable experience.

Ideas to promote understanding and comprehension

• Talk about the front cover and pictures – Where is the title? What do they think might happen in the book? Can they explain why they think that?  What do they think might happen next?
• What words are used to describe settings / characters? What other words could be used instead?
• What was your favourite part of the book? Why?

The more your child practices reading the better they will read.            

Spellings

Children will be learning many spellings and tricky words this year, I have attached copies of all the words we will be covering and would encourage you to practice 5 of each every week alongside the phonics.

I know this may seem a lot, but we have to continue the pace of learning during these exceptional circumstances and we want your child to be as successful as they possibly can.

The Class 1 Team.