Year 1 (O'Keeffe and Van Gogh)

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Year 1 classes are names after Vincent Van Gogh and Georgia O'Keeffe.

“When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it's your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else.” - Georgie O'Keeffe

“I dream of painting and then I paint my dream.” -Vincent Van Gogh

After the building blocks have been put in place by our Early Years Foundation Stage Team, the children move to Year 1 and on to the National Curriculum for Key Stage One.

The 'Continuous Provision' approach is continued throughout the autumn term of Year 1 to ensure there is a smooth transition from EYFS with a mixture of choosing activities and structured play.

As in reception, in Year 1, there is a strong focus on early reading and phonics, ensuring that all children's learn the skills to decode and blend words to read independently, and eventually develop their reading fluency. It is vital that parents and carers continue to support this skill at home - children are expected to read at home every day.

In phonics and reading, we spend time recapping our set 1 and 2 sounds, to become secure and confident readers of decodable texts. We expand our bank of phonics and learn our set 3 sounds, whilst simultaneously consolidating our knowledge of past sounds to bring old and new information together in a cohesive way. We read frequently and listen to stories from the adults around us to build our love of reading.

Click here to find out more about early reading and phonics at King Athelstan.

As well as learning to read, children in Year 1 continue to perfect their pencil grip and develop their cursive handwriting skills to apply this in their daily writing lessons. In English, we make a vast amount of progress. Spending time consolidating what makes a super sentence and becoming independent with the skills to write them. We spend 3 weeks at a time immersing ourselves into a variety of carefully selected texts, exploring the way they make us feel and creating pieces of writing in a variety of formats. We begin practising our cursive handwriting with the support of adults, once we have fine-tuned our letter formation. We discover word classes and begin building our knowledge of how to write in a creative and exciting way.

In maths, we spend our time strengthening our foundational skills in number and place value through concrete, pictorial and abstract representations. We become experts in using a variety of manipulatives and strategies to solve a wide range of mathematical challenges. Parallel to this, we continue to rehearse our KIRF facts, which is an important tool to prepare us for learning our times tables in Year 2. As the year goes on, our skills grow as we become independent and confident mathematicians.

In curriculum, we study three exciting and personable topics throughout the year. We spend time learning about ourselves and what makes us innately who we are. We take a deep dive into our local surroundings in the past, present and future. We use our experiences to shape our learning and take ownership of our journey through life. We spend time having important conversations about society and who we want to be as we grow up. We develop strategies on how to navigate life with the support of the adults around us.