After a lovely summer holiday, we started back as Year 1s in Purple Class!  We kicked off the year with our ‘Me and my Toys’ topic where we have celebrated the similarities and differences between us all.  We read a variety of stories about different types of families and religions, and we created our own family trees.  In science, we have identified our 5 senses and done lots of sensory activities.  We have identified and labelled our body parts and in art we have drawn lots of different types of self-portraits based on different artists.  During BATs we even started looking at body parts under our skin – our bones – with the help of the story, ‘Funny Bones’.  With this new knowledge, we made our very own ‘funky skeletons’!

After reading Dogger, we talked about toys that are special to us and times we have lost them.  On one occasion we even lost Mrs Williams and had to follow clues around school to find her!  We had our own ‘toy day’ where we could bring in our favourite toy from home and talk about why it was special.  It was great fun playing with our toys and sharing them with others.

In history, we looked back many years ago to the Victorian times – this was so long ago it was even before our grandparents were born!  We learnt about Queen Victoria and looked at her huge family tree – she had so many children!  We found out about Victorian toys, parks and pleasure gardens and looked for similarities and differences to those of today.

We were then lucky enough to have a Victorian Toy Workshop come and visit us in school!  Don was brilliant and showed us loads of fantastic Victorian toys.  He told us about the first ever toy, invented in Egypt 3500 years ago.  He taught us the science behind how toys work and brought the toys to life through story telling – he made us laugh lots!  We then got to make our very own Victorian-style toys and we wrote instructions for how to make them.

In computing, we have begun the year learning a variety of new computer skills.  We learnt how to hold and use a computer mouse, how to turn a computer on and shut it down correctly, how to log on and off, and how to save a file, to name but a few!  We’ve also been lucky enough to have RuggerEds in again this term teaching us all the fun skills associated with tennis.  Watch out Wimbledon, we could have the next Murray/Williams on the way!

After a very busy but fun first term in Purple Class, enjoy your half term break next week and then prepare to go back in time to the land of the dinosaurs when we return!