Ade Adepitan Class, Jessica Ennis-Hill Class & Margot Fonteyn Class
Year 1’s class names are inspired by 3 people who have shown great bodily intelligence; two world class Olympian and Paralympian Gold medal winners, and one of the world’s most famous ballet dancers.
Ade Adepitan is a Gold Medal-winning wheelchair basketball player & one of the UK’s best-known Paralympians. He contracted polio as a child but did not let this get in the way of becoming a champion. He’s also a local lad – he grew up only a couple of miles away in Plaistow.
Jessica Ennis is a heptathlon champion whose most famous victory was in the Olympic Games in London 2012. She has several gold medals despite having only been introduced to athletics aged 10!
Margot Fonteyn is a ballet dancer who is widely regarded as one of the greatest classical ballet dancers of all time. Margot started dancing at the age of 4 and she moved to London when she was 14 to pursue her career in ballet.
All our Year 1 athletes show that no matter what your circumstances or your background, you can achieve anything you want if you are determined enough and aim high.
We kick the new year off with a topic all about our favourite things – stories!Â
Our classroom becomes a magical realm where just about anything can happen. We are limited only by our imaginations. We listen to & retell stories of long long ago; tales of kings & queens, of knights & princesses, of castles & dragons. We write our own amazing stories & perform them for the rest of the class.
There’s lots of dressing up stuff in the ‘castle’ in our classroom to get us in the spirit. Everything has a story theme; our maths is set in the context of those stories (we can tell number stories too!) & our science is all about seasonal changes; we sing well known songs in music; our reading & writing are about fairy stories & traditional tales but we also write about our brilliant visits to the Tower of London!Â
By the end of the term we’ve drawn self portraits, designed and built our own castles, been on exciting material hunts &, of course, produced our own amazing ‘Once Upon a Time’ story-book. What a great start to the year!
Click on the links below to see the Autumn Knowledge Organisers:
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We come in on the first morning after the Christmas holiday to discover … our classroom has been invaded by animals. Fish, mammals and birds are all around the room & we find an egg in a nest! How did they all get there?
Once again, everything we do has a zoological theme; we have loads of toy animals & puppets for role play; we read & write information texts but also write stories about animals. This term is driven by science; we do lots of experiments & learn about life processes – the things that all living things do.
But that’s not all.
We learn, in history, about the life & work of George Washington Carver and his legacy in improving soil to help farmers to grow food. We learn about creation stories in RE & use our map skills in geography to plot the location of minibeasts in the playground to help us find them again!
For trips, our first stop is the farm but we also go on local walks to watch the seasonal changes as spring gathers pace. If we’re lucky, a visitor even comes to school with some animals for us to touch & hold.
By the end of the term, our classroom really looks like an animal kingdom, we’ve made 2 and 3D representations of creatures & the landscapes around them & we’ve learned & performed songs about a famous spider. We’re even starting to see the world through the eyes of the animals.
Click on the links below to see the Spring Knowledge Organisers:
It’s the final term of the year; we’re getting a bit older now & starting to think about discovering more about this wonderful city we inhabit – our capital city. Where can we go? How can we get there & what will it be like when we do?
Our room becomes a tourist information office; there are maps everywhere & all the landmarks you might expect. The River Thames holds it all in place & there’s lots of public transport to take us anywhere we want to go.
Everything we learn is set in the context of London – one of the world’s most exciting & diverse cities. We do loads of problem solving in maths especially with measures such as distance & time – so we can catch the right trains! We read the original story of Paddington Bear & his arrival in London from ‘Darkest Peru’. We go on a trip all around London, by train & bus & DLR & boat & then we write about our brilliant day with everything in the right order.
Geography dominates our learning – we learn how to find London on a map, what countries make up the UK & how the UK fits in with all the other countries around it. We think about how different London is to other places in the countryside. We learn about Old Father Thames but we also learn about how humans have shaped our wonderful city.
But perhaps the best fun is reserved for design & technology where we design & build our own vehicles, complete with axles, wheels & a chassis. We are Year 1 and we are going places!
Click on the links below to see the Summer Knowledge Organisers:
