We have had a great start to the term in Autumn A! Year One have been very busy learning all about food, healthy eating, healthy lifestyles, recycling and lots more through our theme ‘Truly Scrumptious’.

In our Languages, Literacy and Communication lessons, we have enjoyed listening to ‘Handa’s surprise’, ‘The Tiger Who Came to Tea’ and ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar’. We have been making character puppets to help us retell the story, using adjectives to describe the fruit that the caterpillar ate and followed instructions carefully to make a cup of tea! We were very careful when making this and enjoyed it with some delicious biscuits. As we are very healthy individuals, we were excited to carefully cut fruit to create our own fruit salad, it was very tasty.

In our Expressive Arts lessons, we have been looking at the amazing work of artist Giuseppe Acrimboldo. He inspired us to create our own self portraits using different fruits and vegetables. During the final week of this half term, we got creative and designed our own outfits using recycled materials. After our designs were finalised, we used recycling to turn our creations into real outfits. At the end of the week, we walked the catwalk in assembly and showcased our fantastic work – showing everyone that recycling isn’t rubbish and we can reuse it to make something great!

In our Numeracy and Mathematics lessons we have been creating party hats for the Tiger’s tea party by decorating them with repeating patterns, we have been identifying the properties of 2D shapes and learning new mathematical language to identify one more than and one less than.

We were interested in finding out where different foods come from. Did you know that they don’t come straight from the supermarket? We explored a map of the world and identified different countries where certain foods grow. We also the journey of banana from the time it grows to the final destination, our fruit baskets at home. Finally, we planted our own cress seeds and completed a science investigation. We predicted how long it would take for the seeds to grow and where they would grow the best. Would they grow better in direct sunlight or in a dark space? With water or without?

We enjoyed learning about Fair Trade and discussing why it is important to buy Fair Trade items as often as we can. We recognised the Fair Trade logo and sorted Fair Trade and not Fair Trade items into the correct categories.

We have been very lucky to have a visit from the Community Champion at our local Tesco store. She visited with lots of interesting information about where the food comes from and what her job role means. We also received a visit from a dentist who spoke to us about the importance of brushing our teeth every day and maintaining a healthy diet.

During October’s Black History Month, we learned about Betty Campbell. She was the first black headteacher in Wales and when told she could not achieve this dream, she kept trying and never gave up. We were inspired by her perseverance and discussed how we could overcome barriers in our futures.

We really enjoyed coming into school wearing different cultural clothes which represent us and our families. We discussed which culture we were representing and were interested in hearing different stories from everyone in our class.

We have had a great start to Year One and are looking forward to continuing our theme in the next half term! I wonder what fun stories we will be reading…