The Hedgehogs

Year

1

The Squirrels

Welcome to year one’s page

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.

All children at Devonshire are encouraged to read regularly at home. Children are given a new home reading book that is matched to their phonics ability each Monday.

They are supported to read this in school throughout the week. Please support your child to try reading their book, even just a page or two, a few times a week at home.

If they read at home, their astronaut can jump to the next planet on our reading display.

PE days for both Squirrels & Hedgehogs are Tuesdays and Wednesdays when they can come into school wearing their PE kit (including trainers that are safe for PE – no crocs or sandals please).

Both classes can collect and change Maths Games for home on Wednesday mornings in the staff room.

We aim to make learning as much fun as possible and cover interesting topics throughout the year with exciting hooks, visitors and trips.

This really encourages the children to engage fully with their learning.

Take a look at what we have been learning about and enjoy seeing some photos of our learning in action.

Summer Term 2026

History and DT - Castles

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

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.

We had a shock back at school one day when our teachers had converted our classrooms into Victorian school set ups, and we had to use chalk and follow some strange old rules!

We were sitting in rows and only allowed to speak when a teacher asked us a question – it was a quiet few minutes!

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!

Sports Day

We all loved our Sports Day in May where we got to show off our excellent PE skills to all of our friends and families.
PE coach Megan spent time this term teaching us skills for hurdles, jumping, slaloms and the triple jump.

We racked up hundreds of points for our teams and loved working together and cheering each other on.

Art - Andy Goldsworthy

The artist that we learned about this term was Andy Goldsworthy, who is a British sculptor.

He only works with natural materials.

We loved having a go at recreating and innovating our own Goldsworthy-style sculptures.

We focused our attention on the shapes and colours he uses in his work.

The children worked both individually and in small groups.

Spring Term 2026

Art – Yayoi Kusama

We enjoyed finding out about some fabulous artists this term. 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

We learnt the stories of the Gingerbread Man and Jack and the Beanstalk this term.

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

We learnt some spelling rules and patterns including the -ed suffix and the un- prefix, and how to join words and ideas with ‘and’.

We are extremely proud of our fairy tale writing.

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 also learnt the features and names of some common flowers and trees that we might find in our local area.

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!

Geography

We have been using maps, atlases and the internet to locate and name the 4 countries of the United Kingdom.

We had great fun looking at and learning about the flags.

We have been learning about the capital cities and in the UK, using capital letters for the proper nouns in our writing.

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 2025

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

English – Curious Quest

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.

Science

Our first science topic was ‘Ourselves and other Animals’. We started by identifying parts of the human body.

We had great fun experimenting with our senses to find out if we could identify smells and tastes using only one sense at a time.

We also looked at the similarities and differences between a wide range of animals and learnt about the characteristics of different groups. We then used this knowledge to sort animals.

Autumn walk

As part of our knowledge harvest about Seasons and Our Local Area, we took a walk to Milton park to embed our oracy and understanding of these concepts in Science and Geography.

We had a wonderful time making autumn leaf caterpillar crafts, and we even spotted a friendly Squirrel!