At St Michael’s our aim is to provide a rich curriculum and a wide range of opportunities that will build the habits of ambitious, capable learning.
Due to safety measures and restrictions that are currently in place, we are starting our year a bit differently than how we usually do things. However, we will do our very best to give the children the best experiences and to ensure they continue to flourish in their potential at our school.
Here is an outline of what the Year 1s will be learning during the Autumn Term.
Literacy
We will be reading and writing stories, and using drama and role play to develop themes and ideas. We will be focusing on sentence structure; ‘Golden Sentence’. This includes capital letters, finger spaces and full stops and uses adjectives to make our writing more interesting.
Children will practise writing lists, posters and instructions to develop their descriptive language. We will also have a big emphasis on handwriting and will be practising this every day. Our focus book will be ‘The Enormous Turnip’.
Numeracy
In addition to embedding the children’s mental maths skills, through our daily CLIC programme and BMBT (Big Maths Beat That), we are following the White Rose Maths curriculum, which covers the whole content of the National Curriculum.
This term the focus will be:
- Place Value (within 10)
- Addition & Subtraction
- Geometry: Shape
- Place Value (within 20)
The learn-its for this term – which we want the children to ‘know off by heart’ are:
- 1 + 1 = 2
- 2 + 2 = 4
- 3 + 3 = 6
- 4 + 4 = 8
- 5 + 5 = 10
- 2 + 1 = 3
- 2 + 3 = 5
TOPIC (History/Geography)
Our topic of ‘We are Britain’ is split into three parts:
Part 1: Sydenham, our local area. Our aim is to develop the children’s knowledge and understanding of their environment by learning about their locality—their school, but also beyond the school gate. We will explore the places we enjoy the most, such as our school and church, and why they are important to us.
Part 2: Our country. We want to develop their learning beyond children’s immediate environment and own locality to the UK in general and therefore this unit has been designed to teach the children to name and locate, on a map, the four countries and capital cities of the United Kingdom and its surrounding seas
Part 3: Our wonderful world. Once we have learnt about our area and our country, we will expand the children’s knowledge to the wider world and how our local area and our country fits into the world.
Science – ‘EVERYDAY MATERIALS’
With this unit of study, we want the children to learn about everyday materials including wood, plastic, metal, water and rock. Children will learn to identify and name everyday materials and will have the opportunity to explore the properties of these materials. They will also work scientifically to explore questions, such as ‘What is the best material for an umbrella?’ Our aim is for children to apply their knowledge of everyday materials to sort objects by their properties.
Religious Education
Our focus this term is learning about the Christian religion and the topic is the Creation Story. We will be discussing the key question: How does God want Christians to look after the world?
We will also be dedicating some time to deepen our understanding of our school values of ‘Respect’, ‘Love’ and in the second half term ‘Peace‘.
PE
PE will be on Monday mornings. This term the children will be focusing on multi-skills, which involves the fundamental movement skills of agility, balance and co-ordination which are the key building blocks in a child’s physical development. Please ensure your child comes to school in their PE kit, tracksuit and trainers on a Monday.
CREATIVE CURRICULUM
The curriculum does not stop here. In addition to all the learning already outlined, the children will also be given ample opportunity to do art and DT (linked to their topic, but also a whole school art project), to participate in music lessons, to take part in drama & dance activities, to develop their personal, social, citizenship and health education (PSCHE), to do computing and to learn another language. In Key Stage 1, we are fortunate to have a teacher from the Italian embassy, who exposes the children to a language other than English.
HOME learning
Following the positive feedback from using CLASSDOJO during lockdown, we will continue to set homework via our dojo platform.
Your child will be sent home with their log in details for classdojo; the log in is in the form of a QR code. Past experience has taught us that it is easier to scan the QR code for tablets and smartphones, but if using a laptop, typing the log in details are a better option. If you would prefer this option, please contact us via our school email, schoolmail@stmichaels.lewisham.sch.uk so we can send this to you. Please note that their existing log in details, given during our period of lockdown provide access to your child’s former year group class dojos. Therefore if you already have this set up on a device, you will need to repeat the process for your child’s current class .
Can we also remind you that in order to refresh the screen and see additions to the page, your child must log out at the end of each session and then log in again when required.
Home learning will include:
- Mathletics (login and password card will be given to them
- Weekly spelling words to learn (children will be tested on a Friday)
- Spelling Learn Its (16 words half termly. Children will be tested at the end of each half term)
- Maths Learn Its
Children will be given sound mats and word mats to practise reading. We will also send home reading books that are changed on a Monday and Thursday. Daily reading is encouraged as it will greatly help your child’s learning in other curriculum areas. Please try to sign your child’s reading log at least twice a week.
Children will be awarded DOJOs points for completing their homework.
stay in touch
Despite the current restrictions about entering our school premises, please do not let that stop you from staying in contact with us. If you wish to speak to us, please contact the school office via schoolmail@stmichaels.lewisham.sch.uk and we will be happy to address any concerns you may have.
