The Hedgehogs

Year

1

The Squirrels

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.