Ashton Under Hill First School

Shaping Bright Futures Together


Holly Class w/b 7th November 2022

This half term, our topic work is all around the theme of 'Where do we come from?' To start this off, we have enjoyed reading and exploring the book 'Home' by Carson Ellis and this has led much of our learning this week. In our reading lesson on Monday, we worked on making inferences and looking for clues in the pictures, trying to work out who might live in the different types of homes the book introduced us to. The children have been on a mission this week to create homes for a selection of toys, they had to think carefully about what that person or animal might need and how it would be welcoming for them, then design and build their chosen toy a home. The Year 1 children have also started their next unit of literacy work all about writing traditional tales. They have independently written a retelling of The Little Red Hen and shown great stamina for writing more at length and starting to sequence sentences. 

In phonics lessons, the Year 1 children have finished learning the alternatives for 'oo', they learnt that the long 'oo' phoneme can be written as ue, ew and u_e, and the short 'oo' phoneme can also be written as u and oul. They have also learnt to read and spell tricky words 'who' and 'again'. The Reception children have also been learning tricky words this week, they have learnt 'go', 'no' and 'the' as well as the phonemes u and e. We have particularly enjoyed playing a bingo game with the tricky words and the children have been setting this up and playing independently when they have chance to choose their own learning. 

In maths lessons this week, the Year 1 children have been using bar models and part part whole models to help them solve missing number problems, as well as starting to solve subtraction problems. They have done lots of practical work to help understand the concept of taking away, as well as representing their work as a number sentence. The Reception children have been creating homes for the numberblocks this week, making sure each number block's house represents their number. These are all now displayed on our wall - number block 5 lives in an impressive block of 5 flats with 5 doors and windows!! 

When we arrived at forest school we discovered some stowaways in the rucksack, some playmobile people had come with us as they wanted a forest home!! The children worked in groups and were very creative creating some fabulous tree houses and wigwams for their small friends. 

Friday was Remembrance Day and we learnt all about why we wear poppies and have a special assembly. We read a story called Peace Lily about a girl who went to help look after the soldiers who had gone to war and watched the CBBC 'Poppies' animation. The children all made their own handprint poppies that we have 'planted' to make a poppy field outside the classroom, do look out for them as you go past.