Kites YR/1 - Mrs Morrissey & Mrs Jones
Welcome to Kites Class - 2024/2025
Welcome to Kites Class - Reception and Year 1
Class Teachers: Mrs Morrissey and Mrs Jones
LSA's: Miss Gallop and Mrs Bedborough
Welcome to Kites
Kites Class Letter
September 2024
Dear Kites, Parents and Carers,
A new school year has begun! We hope that you all had a fantastic break. There will be a ‘Meet the Teacher’ event on Monday 16th Sept for the year 1 parents at 3.30pm to 4.00pm or at 5pm to 5.30pm, so that we can go through the expectations for the year and try to answer all of your questions.
This week, we have been assessing the needs of each child so that we can plan lessons at an appropriate level. Alongside this, we have been practising writing sentences and counting. On Wednesday, we will start a project on spirals inspired by the artist Kandinsky, who specialises in painting. In P.E. we will learn some basic gymnastic shapes and practice our catching skills.
The year 1 children have settled back to school brilliantly and our new reception children have already started making new friends. In life skills, we have chosen some class rules to keep us all safe and we have been talking about this month’s school value of ‘Friendship’. The children are making love heart posters about their families and school friends. The children have enjoyed exploring the school grounds and they have loved going around our running track on the scooters.
Our phonics scheme is the FFT and there are books which match the lessons within this scheme. Each week, we will read a new book in class. This will then be sent home for your child to read several times to build up fluency. In addition to this, your child will choose a ‘love to read’ book to take home. This is a book for you to read together. Children are not expected to be able to read these. They may well be able to read a few of the words, but the idea is that their adult reads the book to them, so that they can listen and enjoy it.
Please note that our days for P.E. are usually Tuesday and Thursday. Please ensure that your child’s P.E. kit is in school and clearly labelled. Children also need to bring a labelled water bottle to school every day.
Best wishes,
The Kites Team
Mrs Morrissey, Mrs Jones, Mrs Bedborough and Miss Gallop
Homework
Homework: This will start next week.
Reading – a minimum of 3 times per week please – every day if you can.
Spellings – Year 1s weekly.
Counting – Year Rs count to 10 /Year 1s Count to 30 and back again fluently.
Topic Web Autumn Term
Kites Class Catch up - Friday 12th July
Kites Class have been enjoying lots of learning time outdoors when the weather has allowed! We have been up to Wallop Woods to look for signs of Summer and built dens to help animals survive in a storm. We have been 'red word detectives' hunting for red words in our outdoor area and using them to write sentences. We have also enjoyed some fun sports afternoons with the 360' coaches. We have been busy carrying out scientific experiments, designing different sails for boats to help them sail better, thinking about the best shapes and materials to use. We have been testing the strength and buoyancy of our boats by counting how many dinosaurs they will take before they sink! Our focus Literacy text for the last few weeks has been 'Captain Flinn and the Pirate Dinosaurs.' The children have created some fantastic story maps writing their own version of the story and have recreated it using our small world and role play props. In Maths we have been looking at maps and positional language, directing our friends around the classroom, programming beebots and describing a small world scene for our partner to copy. We have also been busy crafting, making telescopes, boats and all sorts of junk modelling designs. We are looking forward to the disco tonight and our river trip next week!
Have a good weekend :)
Kites Catch Up Friday 21st June
Kites are having a great time learning about the seaside and the creatures that live in the sea. They have been sharing and grouping shells and pebbles to build an understanding of multiplication and division. They have been using shapes or natural objects to continue or create repeating patterns as well as consolidating the skills already learnt with numbers to 20.
In literacy we have been reading the text 'Lucy and Tom at the Seaside' and the children have been doing lots of different writing activities. In our creative arts and design the children have made jelly fish and Mrs Moss filed up the tuff tray with jelly for the children to have some messy sensory fun. In music we have been singing lots of different seaside songs and in PE we have been getting ready for sports day and having a go at ‘under the sea’ cosmic yoga. We have created a seaside shop in Kites class and the children have been busy making ice-creams and lollies to sell. Oh, we do like to be beside the seaside!
Have a great weekend.
Kites Class Catch Up - Friday 17th May
What a busy few weeks in Kites Class! We have continued our learning about Space, writing our own non-fiction fact pages about planets, building rockets to fly to the moon and making galaxy splatter paintings in the style of Jackson Pollock! We have been learning about 2D and 3D shapes, how to describe, manipulate and rotate them and have created some brilliant shape pictures. Our Literacy text is now "Whatever Next" by Jill Murphy and we have enjoyed retelling the story using props, and writing down what we think the characters would say when they arrived on the Moon.
With the warmer, sunnier weather appearing, we have really enjoyed using our outdoor classroom more, experimenting with water play and sand, painting on outdoor easels and even using the stage area for role play and storytelling. We have been learning ball skills in P.E, including, bouncing, kicking, throwing and catching. We had a great time on our visit to the Army Flying Museum, learning all about planes and helicopters from the past and from today, and were very lucky to be the first school to see the new Apache helicopter on display in the hangar! The children really enjoyed making helicopters and aeroplanes, learning how to marshall the helicopters, completing an 'eagle trail' and of course trying out the play areas!
We are looking forward to some more learning around aircraft next week.
Have a great weekend :)
Kites Class Catch up - 19th April 2024
We have had a great first week back in Kites Class and can't believe we are in Summer Term already! The children have settled back in well and were very excited to see that our class caterpillars had transformed into chrysalises over the Easter Holidays and that some had emerged from their chrysalises as butterflies! We enjoyed observing them in their butterfly house and drawing their life cycle, then released them into Wallop Woods on Friday where they seemed to make a new home amongst the bluebells. We will put some pictures on Tapestry for you to see!
The children have been very enthusiastic about our new topic, 'Ticket to Ride', which is all about transport, and at the moment, space travel! We have been exploring our new space station in our role play corner, and taking on the roles of astronauts and space explorers. We have begun looking at our new non fiction text, 'First Big Book of Space', and learning some facts about the sun and different planets in our solar system. We are going to use these facts to write our own fact files about our favourite planets. In Maths, we are looking at numbers up to 20, finding patterns, ordering and comparing. Our new phonics sound this week has been 'ur' and our red words are 'when', 'today' and 'what'. The children will be bringing home our new guided reading book 'Bells and Buds' to read at home over the next week.
Our new topic web has been sent home and is also displayed here for your information.
Have a great weekend : )
Kites Class Catch up! 22nd March 2024
It has been a very busy couple of weeks in Kites Class! We spent a lot of time rehearsing for and then performing in our whole school Creative Arts Festival. We really enjoyed learning the story of the Hungry Caterpillar and our 'Spring Chicken' song and performing them to all of the grown ups and friends who came to watch.
We have continued learning about Spring, growing and changing. We have been growing our own cress in class and observing the changes each day, recording them in our own diaries. We have been measuring our cress with rulers. We have also been looking at 3D shapes in Maths and learning to name and describe cubes, cuboids, spheres and cones. We have moulded and painted salt dough ladybirds and written instructions to tell others how to make them.
We have continued our Literacy learning around 'What the Ladybird Heard'. Last week we made rosettes for our fine prize cow and created detailed maps of where he would live on our farm. This week, our fine prize cow went missing! We found evidence (a muddy boot and a dirty glove and a mask!) that it may have been Hefty Hugh and Lanky Len who took him. We have been acting as detectives, asking questions to see if anyone knows where he has gone. We wrote directions of where to find him using our maps, and wrote letters to the two thieves asking to bring him back! We have been practising using full stops, questions marks and exclamation marks in our writing.
In phonics we have been learning the digraph 'or' and have been enjoying our book 'Jim and the Corn' which will come home in book bags this weekend.
We are really looking forward to our trip to the farm next week!
Have a lovely weekend :)
This week in Kites Class - 1st March 2024
We have had a great week in Kites Class learning the stories of 'The Hungry Caterpillar' and 'What the Ladybird Heard' as part of our new Spring topic, 'Come Outside'. We made giant food props to use when we perform 'The Hungry Caterpillar' at the Arts Festival later in the month. We have learnt to sequence the story of 'What the Ladybird heard' and predicted what the story was about using the front cover for clues. We have been enjoying acting it out using small world animals and props, and some of the children decided to be detectives and interviewed everyone to find out where the robbers had taken the fine prize cow! Our role play area has turned into a farmers market and we are enjoying going shopping for fresh fruit and vegetables. We are learning all about the numbers 9 and 10 in Maths, including different ways of representing the numbers and partitioning the numbers into two groups. We have created a class mind map to record all the things we would like to find out about in our new topic adn we have some brilliant questions to research, including 'Why do farmers put manure on the fields?', 'how do i grow fruit?' and 'why do cockerals say cock-a-doodle-doo in the morning'? We are looking forward to finidng out :)
This week in Kites - 9th February 2024
We have had an exciting end to the term, designing and making our own 'Jungle Juices' for our school cooks, Debbie and Juliette, to try! We also got to try them ourselves and we thought they were 'yummy' and 'the best'! We learnt to chop, mash, blend and squeeze and even had a 'juicing station' set up in the classroom. We have also written our own poems about jungle animals and created a class poem about lions. In Maths, we have been learning about measuring, and compared the heights of everyone in the class. We have talked about timetables and measuring time using sandtimers and stopwatches. Max managed 87 star jumps in one minute! In phonics, we have been learning the digraph 'oa' and are bringing home 'Toad in the Rain' to read over half term. We hope you all have a lovely and fun-filled half term break :)
This fortnight in Kites - 26th January 2024
Another busy fortnight in the Kites jungle! This week, Gerald the Giraffe went missing! There were sightings of him all over the school but nobody could find him so we had to make 'missing' posters to help get him back! We used our best descriptive language to explain to others what Gerald looked like and where he was last seen. We then followed a map to find him in Wallop Woods where he was hiding in the trees! We were very relieved to find him and bring him back to Kites Class. We decided we needed to make some maps of Africa for Gerald incase he ever decided to go home to the jungle, as we didn't want him to get lost again. We looked at some real maps of Kenya and drew some of the landmarks onto our own maps and labelled them for Gerald.
We have been busy looking at 6, 7, & 8 this week, finding different ways of representing and partitioning the numbers and Mrs Moss and Mrs Morrissey have been very impressed with the number sentences we have been making to show one more and one less than a number! Last week we explored capacity and counted how many conkers, teddies and cubes it took to fill a container, and measured the amount of water it held.
We have made Gerald Giraffe rainmakers and have enjoyed playing with chalk, mud and sand too! We have learnt the 'ai' and 'ee' sounds in phonics and have been using these in our writing. Phew!
Have a lovely weekend and a good rest :)
This week in Kites - 12th January 2024
We have had a roarsome week in Kites Class as we were transformed into tigers, lions, giraffes, butterflies and snakes on Monday when Mrs Morrissey painted our faces! We loved becoming jungle animals and used our face paint to help us describe a jungle creature in our writing task. We have also been busy learning about '1 more' and '1 less' in Maths, and finding different ways of making 4 & 5. We have been dancing like elephants and lions in P.E and have made lion faces in our creative area! We have had another consolidation week in phonics, revising sounds we already learnt, and our new phonics book, 'Sock Shopping' is coming home this week. Have a great weekend!
This week in Kites - Friday 5th January 2024
We have had a fantastic first few days back in school after a lovely Christmas break! The children have settled back into their routines and learning brilliantly; we jumped straight in with a phonics review week and our new book, 'Ben gets to Bed'. We have begun our new topic, 'Amazing Amimals', and the children were excited to see that a jungle area has appeared in Kites Class, complete with an explorers jeep and lots of jungle creatures! We began learning about our new English text, 'Giraffes can't Dance' and spent time sharing what we knew about jungle animals and what we wanted to find out. We will be looking at this text for the next few weeks. In Maths we are looking at the numbers 0-5, understanding what 0 means and becoming more confident in using and recognising these numbers. We are excited to see what we look like as jungle animals when we have our faces painted next week!
This week in Kites - 15th December 2023
Kites Class have had a fun and festive last couple of weeks at school! We have enjoyed rehearsing and performing our nativity for friends and parents and loved dressing up in our costumes! We have had lots of creative projects on the go; from snowflake decoration and paperchain making to Christmas cards, our own wrapping paper designs made using stamps and marshmallow snowmen to take home, we have embraced all things festive! We have also loved using our 'Santa's workshop' roleplay area, dressing up as reindeer and elves and wrapping presents, posting letters to The North Pole and helping Santa prepare for Christmas eve! We have also done some great writing, showing off our fantastic phonics skills - Mrs Moss and Mrs Morrissey are so proud of the amazing progress all the children have made with their phonics this term! We have been writing some addition and subtraction number sentences in maths and using physical resources to count one more and one less. What superstars we have in Kites Class! We hope everyone has a restful and fun holiday and we cannot wait for more learning adventures together in the new year 🙂
This week in Kites - 24th November 2023
We have been busy again in Kites Class with lots of fantastic learning! We have been learning the stories of The Gingerbread Man and Little Red Riding Hood as part of our 'Traditional Tales' topic. We made gingerbread men characters and sequenced the story, then tried to build the gingerbread man a bridge across the river in our water play area! We took a trip to Wallop Woods to hear the story of Little Red Riding Hood and went on a sensory walk, using our phonics knowledge to help us write words to describe things we heard, saw, smelt and touched in the woods. In Maths, we have been learning about the numbers 4 and 5, and made our own speckled frogs on logs to help ,us find 1 more, 1 less and partition the numbers into different groups. We have been busy practising our Nativity songs too and learnt about the festival of Diwali, using coloured rice to make Rangoli patterns.
Topics
This term our main topic will be 'Amazing Animals'. We will be reading the story 'Giraffes can't Dance' by Giles Andreae as well as 'Rumble in the Jungle' by the same author, and using these as inspiration for a range of descriptive and poetry writing activities. We have created a jungle role play area in the classroom and will be making explorer dens outdoors, as well as creating jungle dances in our P.E lessons! We will also use enhanced provision to give the children plenty of ways to investigate our topic.
Topic Web Summer Term 1
Topic Web Spring Term 1
Kites Topic Web - Spring Term 2 2023
EYFS
Kites Class have phonics taught daily using FFT ‘Success For All Phonics’ programme (SFA Phonics). SFA Phonics is a government validated Systematic Synthetic Phonics (SSP) programme. The children learn a new sound daily and teachers follow the programme plans and use the programme’s resources. To support children, there is a fun daily Alphabet Chant that includes dynamic actions and each GPC (Grapheme Phoneme Correspondence) we teach includes an engaging picture and a mnemonic phrase that help the children link the grapheme to the phoneme that is being presented.
The teacher adds to their phonics working wall, using the SFA Phonics Picture Sound Card Wall Set cards. As well as the daily phonics lesson, the children are also given opportunities within their child led activities to apply their skills.
Please follow the link below for more information.
Maths
Here are some video montages of the ways we learn to recognise numbers and quantities. We will add more images of the the children as we progress through the term.
Kites Number One
Kites Book of Two
Kites Book of Three
Seasonal Adventures