The Hedgehogs

Year

1

The Squirrels

To support our children’s transition to year 1 from reception, the first few weeks of the autumn term are structured in a similar way to the days in yr R. As the children become more confident we move to a more structured day.

All children at Devonshire are encouraged to read regularly at home and they can change their reading books daily. Book boxes are out on the tables during ‘Good Morning’ time every Monday, Wednesday and Friday for children to choose a new book and share a book with a parent or friend.

PE days for both Squirrels & Hedgehogs are Monday and Wednesdays. Their kit will be sent home half termly and always need to be returned to school on the first Monday after a holiday.
We aim to make learning as much fun as possible for our pupils and cover interesting topics such as dinosaurs and pirates during the year. This really encourages the children to engage fully with their learning.

Here you will find information about the topics we have covered over the year and the trips and events that we have undertaken.Take a look at what we have been learning about and enjoy viewing the photos of our trips and events.

Spring Term 2023

Circus Week

Yet again, Circus Week was fantastic.

The children built on the skills they were introduced to in YR, as well as learning new ones such as juggling with clubs and hats!

Exploring Southsea

We learnt about our local area and the physical and human features of Southsea.

Then we dressed up as explorers and went for a long walk to the seafront.

We spotted lots of landmarks that we had seen on Google maps.

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.

Some of the children dressed up to look like Shackleton and answered questions about his life.

Fairy Tales

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

We read them together using expression for the different characters.

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

We then created our own fairy tale character and wrote descriptive sentences using year 1 writing skills

Science

Alongside learning the story of Jack and the Beanstalk we had a go at growing 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 talk about the different parts of a plant.

Art – L.S. Lowry

Finally, in art we studied the artist 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 and paint, to create pictures in a similar style.

Autumn Term 2022

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

Animals

Our first topic was ‘Animals’. We looked at the similarities and differences between a wide range of animals and learnt about the characteristics of different groups. In particular we really enjoyed making our own non fiction books.