The Hedgehogs

Year

1

The Squirrels

To support our children’s transition to year 1 from reception, the first part of the autumn term are structured in a similar way to the days in Reception.

This includes keeping familiar parts of the day like Drawing Club and Discovery Time. As the children become more confident throughout the Autumn term we move to a more structured day.

English – Curious Quest

Building on the children’s experience of Drawing Club in YR, they have continued to produce wonderful drawings and writing in English, which has evolved to be known as Curious Quest.

Daily they received messages from the mysterious Professor Klunk and his friends Noodle and Titch, through our magic portal, The Magic Mustard Tin.

This has given the children real purpose to encourage them with their writing and their progression has been fabulous. Below is a snapshot of some of their drawings.

History and DT - Castles

This topic was so much fun and the children really enjoyed learning about what life was like in medieval times.

There were such a lot of different jobs in the castle including a ditcher, cook and knight.

We talked about which job we thought would be the worst and which would be the best!

The ditcher definitely seemed to have the worst deal!

In DT we learnt how to make a free-standing tower and how to join walls.

We also practised making a drawbridge.

One of the DT focuses behind this was to make our castles as strong and secure as we could.

Once we had practised these skills individually, we worked in teams to create a larger-scale castle.

We were delighted to see how well the teams worked together, sharing ideas and being supportive, just like the Together Twins.

We finished the topic with a trip to our very own castle in Southsea!

We met Henry VIII, well, his statue and saw all of the cannons and cannon balls.

It was very interesting to see how incredibly thick castle walls really are!

History - Victorians

We had great fun going back in time and finding out about what life was like 1875.

We looked at Victorian household artefacts and tried to guess what they were used for.

We had a very exciting trip to Manor Farm.

We didn’t think it was much fun to go to school in Victorian times and all agreed that life is a lot easier now than it was then.

We enjoyed ourselves enormously and had great fun with the hands-on learning we experienced.

PSHE and DT – Fruit salads

One of our PSHE focuses was on healthy food and healthy eating.

We used this theme in DT to plan and make a fruit salad.

We then thought about what had worked well and what we might improve.

During the following week, the children planned and made a savoury salad, with some of them being brave enough to try foods that were new to them.

Obviously, the best part was eating their salads!

Music

We had the most amazing experience in the school hall when ‘Playground Proms’ came to visit.

They put on a spectacularly energetic performance with a double bass, two violins and a viola.

The whole school was engrossed by the beautiful music that they played whilst still having so much fun!

SpringTerm 2025

Art – Yayoi Kusama

We enjoyed finding out about some fabulous artists this term.

This was the first year that we investigated Yayoi Kusama and the children had great fun creating their own pictures in her distinctive style.

As you can see, she loves bright colours, spots, pumpkins and mushrooms.

History - Ernest Shackleton

We loved finding out about the amazing life of the explorer Ernest Shackleton and how him and his crew survived on the ice for two years!

We talked about a wide range of things that they would have needed to survive.

We acted out his great expedition and discovered how brave and determined he was.

English - Fairy Tales

Next, we learnt the stories of the Gingerbread Man and Jack and the Beanstalk.

We acted out the stories and had the opportunity to discuss what we thought of the different characters.

We then decorated a gingerbread biscuit each and created our own gingerbread character.

We wrote descriptive sentences to describe our gingerbread person using year 1 writing skills.

Science

Alongside learning the story of Jack and the Beanstalk we grew our own beans.

As with all nature, some of them were wonderful, while others didn’t do much at all.

However, we enjoyed spotting any changes that we noticed and talked about the different parts of a plant.

We took part in a cress investigation to find out what the best conditions are for a plant to grow.

Each group gave their seeds different conditions.

One had no water, one had no cotton wool to lie on, one had no light and one went in the fridge! It was really exciting to see the results!

Art – L.S. Lowry

At the end of the term we studied the artist L. S. Lowry. We found out all about his work and the type of art that he made.

We looked at techniques that he had used to create his work and experimented with different media, such as charcoal, art pencils, printing and painting to create pictures in a similar style.

Autumn Term 2024

We have had a very exciting half term and learnt lots of new skills.

Drawing Club

In English we have continued to enjoy Drawing Club as the children were so enthused by this approach to writing and drawing in Year R.

We have been amazed by their progress and creative imaginations.

Drawing Club developed into Curious Quests when Professor Klunk left his Magic Mustard Tin portal in our classroom.

The children love receiving messages via the portal in every English lesson.

Professor Klunk sends us skills to learn, which we then send back to him to help the Great Big Story Dream Machine to fill with magnificent writing.

As you can imagine, the children are really motivated to draw and write every day.

We also had the most fun bringing this to life by building our own Great Big Story Dream Machine in class.