Electricity & Forces

We have been learning about electricity and the journey it makes from the Power Station, to our homes. We use electricity for all sorts of things in the house and at school - whiteboard, computers, radio. Batteries are another source of electricity.


We have been making complete circuits in Year 1, using a battery, two wires
and a bulb. It was very fiddly to get the bulb to light up by touching both ends of the battery with a wire.

We wrote about electricity and drew a complete circuit into our Science books. We are getting very good at our Science Investigations. Next week, Ian, from Bike-It will be coming to talk with us about the forces that we need to make a bike move and showing us how to make a fruit smoothie by pedalling a bike!

Our reading in Year One is getting so good that Miss Welton asks us to 'be the teacher' when she is too tired to read us a story at fruit time. We are soooo good at reading, here is the new 'teacher' reading the story book upside down to Year One. We listen beautifully and help them with any difficult words.

Here we are!!!!

Hello again! and apologies for the absence; to say that we have been experiencing 'technical problems', would be putting it mildly with first the camera, then the network.... so, without further ado:


Toward the end of last term, Year 1 were out enjoying the early Spring sunshine, preparing the garden beds for the planting that we will be doing this term. We have sunflower plants to grow as part of our class groups competition to see which group can grow the tallest, tomato plants and a small variety of other plants. Any contributions would also be most gratefully received.

Dave, from the Bristol Bee-keeping Society, came into the classroom to talk with us about the Honeybee. We learnt that there are many types of bee, but only a few honey bees. Bees are incredibly important for plants to grow. We need bees to help the plants to grow. Dave showed us some amazing pictures of hives bees and showed us some honeycomb. We tasted some delicious types of honey that Dave's honeybees had made. It was yummy!

We have been learning how to measure accurately, using cubes and string. We practised measuring the length of each other, which was a bit tricky. We have learnt that in order to measure a curved line, you have to measure it with a piece of string first and then stretch the string straight to measure the length accurately. We know that the standard measure that people use is a centimetre, or cm.

A very interesting lady came into our school to talk with us about what it is like to be blind. She brought her Guide Dog with her as well. She spent some time in Year 1 talking with us. We stroked the dog and asked her lots of questions that we thought of. We tried to imagine what it would be like being blind, by closing our eyes and listening to all the sounds around us.

In RE, we have been thinking about special things that belong to us. We then learnt about the special things that belong to someone from a religious group, like a Muslim. Here we are looking at some special Muslim artefacts.

Year One had a fab time at their pyjama party! We played games, danced, watched a DVD and had yummy hot chocolate and biscuits to dunk! It has made us want to get all the sweets in the jar quickly so that we can have another reward!

In Design and Technology, we designed and made our own fruit kebabs. First, we had to try all the different fruits to help us to decide which fruits we wanted to use in our kebabs. Then, we had to think about our fruit kebab design - what tastes did we want together, which colours, what pattern - next, we had to prepare and cut the fruit and put them onto our skewer. They were very delicious and incredibly healthy!

In number work, we have been using the laptops and playing numeracy games to help us consolidate our learning of money and making change. Miss Welton thinks that we are very good on the laptops and we concentrate very hard while we are using them.

Hopefully there will be no more 'technical problems' now that both the camera and the website are working again. See you again in a fortnight!

Year 1 were absolutely fantastic in their end of topic Indian performance.

The three dance teachers, Erinn, Evee and Ellie, were excellent when they led the Bollywood Jai Ho dance for the parents and grown-ups to watch.


The class sang Govinda Jai-Ha, a Hindu prayer song accompanied by percussion instruments and shared their writing and paintings.

Our new topic is Plants and we have been reading a book by Eric Carle called The Tiny Seed, which is all about the lifecycle of a seed. We have explored the artistic style of Eric Carle. Here we are designing flowers and bees with tissue paper for a classroom display, in the same style as Eric Carle.

Our display is in the role-play area of the classroom. We have had a lot of fun playing in the florist and looking after our sunflower seed that we planted in our groups. We are having a competition between our groups to see which seed becomes the tallest sunflower.

We went on a Science exploration around the school grounds. Our investigation took us plant hunting, studying the different types of plants and looking at the areas that they were growing in.

Spring is a perfect time for us to begin our topic.

Bye Bye India!! Thank you very much! ( written by the children)

We have enjoyed our India topic VERY! much. We have enjoyed using our imaginations to write about the country. We have explored the country on Google Earth and compared it to England, we have enjoyed the dancing, singing and being creative.

This week, we tasted lots of different Indian foods and then wrote about them, using describing words and reasons for which foods we enjoyed the most.



We tried mango, samosas, poppadoms, Bombay mix and pomegranante....



...it was exciting trying the pomegranante. We had read about it in a story and couldn't imagine what it would be like. The fruit was full of ruby red jewels!

We used lots of words to describe the food: spicey, delicious, sweet, sour, juicy, crunchy... some of the food was really really hot! Miss Welton laughed soooo much when we rushed to the sink for a cool drink of water!

In Literacy, we have been drawing story maps of the different stories that we've been reading. We made a story map of Ganesh steals the Moon. We then took it in turn with our talk partners to re-tell the story to each other. With the story map to look at, we remembered so much detail. Some of us decided to be the teacher and re-tell the story to the rest of the class. it was easy to remember by looking at the pictures and deciding what came first, next, and sequencing the story correctly.

Here are some pictures of us enjoying the role-play area and dressing up in the Indian clothes and Saris.

Next term, our topic will be Plants. Miss Welton has asked us to do our homework which is labelling the parts of the plant and finding out what each part does and to think about anything that we would like to learn about plants.

Enjoy the half term :-)