We have 23 boys and 7 girls in our class that are delightful, fun, hardworking and kind.

Miss Hulbert is our teacher and Mrs Mulholland is our teaching assistant.

Summer Term 2

Wildlife Day

The children had so much fun when Neil from Wildlife Friendly Otley visited the school. They had already asked Mrs Choma if they could create a nature garden and made wonderful designs. The children had fun creating Bugingham Palace which was a very special home for minibeasts! Other activities included making bird and butterfly feeders, planting, identifying habitats and finding homes for different living things including a hedgehog house. We also had a very special visit where the children had the opportunity to observe real bats! In the afternoon, the children played wildlife games.

After creating amazing art work, the children sold their masterpieces to parents and grandparents to raise money for Wildlife Friendly Otley. Thank you to everyone who bought the children’s work.

The last week in school was very hot so we cooled down with ice lollies and fans.

RE

Year 1 have been learning about Judaism. We learned about the ten commandments and created our own Torah, choosing the commandments that we thought were important in our lives today. We thought about why Jewish people celebrate Passover. We listened to the story of how Moses led God’s people to freedom by parting The Red Sea. When the Pharaoh reneged (once again) on his promise and chased them, God closed the sea and the Egyptians were drowned.

KS1 had their first Mass of the year in church. Mrs Harvey praised Y1 for their beautiful singing, readings and fantastic behaviour throughout the mass.

We have now started learning about the miracles of Jesus. The children thought about the feelings of the paralysed man when he got up and walked. We had lots of fun retelling the story using four pieces of cardboard!

Next we learned about the how Jesus calms the storm and thought about the feelings of the disciples and Jesus.

English

In English, we became very creative when deciding what our stick could become! We wrote a recount of what Stanley did with his stick when writing a postcard to his friend Bertie and added in our own creations. We focused on using regular verbs in the simple past tense (ed)

Maths

We are so good at Maths that we are now confidently working with numbers to one hundred. Here we are partitioning numbers.

We have begun to learn about time. We discussed lots of time related words together. We talked a little bit about the different times of the day and when we perform certain tasks. Is breakfast in the morning or the evening? We discussed the numbers on the (teaching) clock. The large hand is the minute hand and the small hand tells us the hour.

Art

Having created a sculpture to represent Otley, the children painted and labelled them. Here are their amazing creations.

We finished learning about sculptures by making a wobbly stick person out of pipe cleaners and Hama beads.

The children decided that they would like to raise money for Otley Friendly Wildlife after enjoying our wildlife day and understanding the importance of taking care of our environment. They decided that to raise money, they would like to create artwork to sell. We created landscape art using felt tip pens and watercolor paints and flowering meadows and gardens using pastels and watercolours. Here are some of our wildlife pictures.

Music

In Music this term, we have been enjoying getting outside to sing songs with actions. Y1 have done really well to learn and remember all the actions to the following songs: Jump Jim Joe, Double This- Double That, In and Out The Shady Bluebells and Ding-Dong I’ve got the Rhythm In my Head.

PE
We have begun a new unit in PE on tennis and practised our forehand grip whilst bouncing the ball on the ground. We then gently bounced the ball on our racket up and down and moved side to side whilst bouncing the ball. We also competed in teams doing ball balancing exercises whilst walking up and down the playground.

We are very lucky to have a cricket coach in school to teach us how to play cricket. Lots of us attend cricket club too so we are very good at it!

Here we are developing our tennis skills.

Science

The butterflies hatched on a beautiful summer day! YR joined us to release them into the world.

We have enjoyed exploring Living Things around the school grounds in the lovely summer weather. On our leaf hunt we found a wide variety of trees in our school grounds. Most were deciduous trees including oak, ash, and birch.

It was very interesting to find lots of different types of seeds underneath the trees.

We have been observing a special Birch tree that grows next to The Pavilion.

During the winter it was empty and bare. Now it is covered again with beautiful green leaves. It is lovely to play in the shade during the Heatwave.

ICT

In ICT this term, the children edited the photographs from our wildlife day. They even added a title and changed the font and colour. They also programmed Bebbots and followed instructions.

Summer Term 1

Geography

Local Field Work

We enjoyed a walk around Otley to look at the physical and human features of the landscape. We know that features such as The Chevin, the River Wharfe, and the ponds at Gallows Hill are all physical features. Whereas the bridge, the statue and Otley Market Square are all human features. We collected data about some of the features and facilities in Otley and thought about how the town could be improved. We even followed a map and got to play on the playground at Wharfe Meadows Park.

We learned about human features and physical features in England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. We have learnt that human features are made by humans and are those which humans have changed or influenced, these include: roads, bridges, walls buildings and statues. Physical features like seas, mountains and rivers are natural. They would be here even if there were no people around.

In Art we’ve been thinking about how we could design a sculpture for Otley. We learned about different sculpture artists including Barbara Hepworth, Jill Townsley, Michelle Reader and Eva Rothschild and were amazed that you could make a sculpture out of anything, even plastic spoons and sugar cubes! We thought about all the things that Otley is well-known for and designed our own sculptures. We began to learn different techniques to use air dry clay.

RE

Pentecost

We have continued to learn about the events in Eastertide and have been thinking about Pentecost which is the festival when Christians celebrate the gift of the Holy Spirit. It is celebrated on the Sunday 50 days after Easter. It is an important event in the liturgical calendar as it is the birthday of the Christian church. We reflected on the events that happened as the Holy Spirit descended on Jesus' followers, arriving like a strong wind and looking like tongues of fire. The children in Year 1 lead the Penetcost assembly.

The Resurrection

We have been thinking about the importance of Mary Magdalene’s role within the Easter story. Having already witnessed Jesus’ death on the cross, she was then present at the tomb. Mary was the first person to whom Jesus appeared after his resurrection and the first to preach the “Good News” of that miracle. We reflected on her feelings of confusion, bewilderment and then joy. We also thought about the feelings of the disciples when Jesus appeared.

Other Religions

We have been exploring cultural foods during times of celebrations. Miss Sarfraz has been teaching us about Ramadan. We learnt that during the month of Ramadan, Muslims won't eat or drink during the hours of daylight. We reflected on the special meal to mark the end of Ramadan called Eid-al-Fitr. We made Chana Chaat in class and it was delicious! 

CAFOD Eyes of the World

In preparation for Britain being the hosts of the United Nations’ climate change talks, we watched the CAFOD film the Eyes of the World in Collective Worship and have been thinking about how we can come together to look after and take care of our world.  We produced art looking down on a world that has been looked after and one that has not!

Maths

In Maths, we have been practising counting in 2s, 5s and 10s for a while now. We used our understanding of counting in multiples to help us begin to understand multiplication. We used lots of practical resources to help us see multiplication as ‘lots of’ and ‘groups of.

Next we focused on division. We have been introduced to the division symbol ÷ and began to use this in our number sentences. We have used counters to visually represent division in a variety of formats: bar model, in a number line and in a part-whole model.

Our final learning this half term was fractions. We learned about a whole, half and quarter and used lots of visual representations. We even made pizzas and folded them into slices to think about a half and quarter of a shape.

We have been looking at the mass of a variety of everyday objects. We placed the items on a balance scale and made predictions about how many cubes would balance the scale. We discussed the heaviest and lightest objects. 

English

In English we finished our work about the Naughty Bus. We wrote diary entries about all of the crazy things that he got up to in a week. We wrote our entries in chronological order and used a conjunction for each sentence to give extra information. We then used our imagination to think and write about his night time adventures.

We started a new book in English called Dinosaurs and all That Rubbish which introduces the key concepts of pollution and conservation. We thought about the main character’s desire to travel to a star and the things that we would wish for.

Science

Animals and Humans

We will be exploring the life cycle of the butterfly. We are very lucky to have class caterpillars which have just formed their chrysalis! The children have already been eagerly observing and waiting for something exciting to happen. We will be discussing the different stages in the life cycle.

We had a very exciting visitor today! The children asked Mrs Hart lots of questions. We will be learning about life cycles next half term.

In Science, we have finishing our learning about senses thinking about taste. We learnt that the tongue uses taste buds to tell the brain what we are tasting. We tasted bitter things at the back of our tongue, sour tastes at either side and salty/sweet tastes at the front. We enjoyed a taste test where we were able to taste different foods to see where our taste receptors are. 

Plants

We enjoyed the sunshine and went out to identify plants and record observations in Science. We found lots of different flowers within the school grounds and were able to make sketches and label the different parts of the flower. 

PE

In PE, Mrs Fenton-Green has been helping us to develop our throwing and catching skills. We started by throwing bean bags to our partner from the sitting position, then we progressed to our knees and then standing. We practised moving around and getting into position quickly to throw and catch to one another.

Spring Term 2

Spring Term 2 started at home again with a challenge to build a tower, bridge of building linked to our new English book Iggy Peck Architect. Here are some of the children’s fantastic creations!

Science

We have been finding out more about the human body and our senses. We used our sense of sight and hearing both in and outside the classroom to explore the world around us. We also had fun trying out different ‘optical illusions’.

We also investigated our sense of smell and taste. We had the chance to smell soap, mustard, oranges and chocolate. Then we tasted bitter celery, sour lemons, savoury crisps and sweet chocolates. I’m sure you can guess what our favourite tastes were !

Science Week

For Science Week we’ve had lots of fun carrying out investigations. We’ve raced balloons along a piece of string and made predictions about the distance they travelled and whether size/shape determined their speed. We’ve compared card flowers uncurling in water and made predictions about the time this would take and whether size affected the outcome. 

On Thursday we had great fun and got a bit messy planting cress and bean seeds. We wrotye instruction and are now wondering whose will be the first to sprout?  The cress grew in 3 days! We also created designs for our new nature garden.

Games Week

It’s been Games Week and we took part in all the yorkshire challenges to develop so many skills. We tried to skip which is a bit tricky when you are five and six years old but we learned that practise makes us better. We loved throwing and catching frisbees and balls in the frisbee and cricket challenges. Throw head, shoulder, catch was our favourite! We learned how to do some street dance moves and little routnes whch were very quick. Last we played ping pong which was lots of the children’s favourite.

English

We began reading the book Iggy Peck, Architect. Iggy made lots of interesting structures out of all sorts of things. We designed and built our own creations and wrote about them. We used conjnctions to write about Iggy and Miss Greer.

Next, Iggy wrote a letter to Year 1 asking for our help. He has to write a book about the buildings and architecture in London and really does not know very much about this. We learned about the buildings in our capital citiy and made books to send to him. We are waiting for a reply.

With cross curricular links to our current topic we have been looking at lots of landmarks in our capital city of London: The Cheese Grater, The Walkie Talkie and the Gherkin. We have written about them and used conjunctions to explain where they can be found in London.

When we arrived at school, we were somewhat dismayed to find that our red, London bus known as ‘Naughty Bus’ had run amok and tipped over pen-pots, knocked over chairs and emptied children’s wallets. We wrote a letter to him, telling him how disappointed we were in his behaviour and asked him not to do that again!

World Book Day

We celebrated World Book Day and in preparation we have been recording ourselves reading books for our reading buddies in Y5. We enjoyed lots of fun activities, a scavenger hunt, The Masked Reader Quiz, and a story from Miss Milne to name just a few.

RE

We have been reflecting on the most important season in the Christian calendar in RE -Lent. We have learnt about the different ways that we can prepare for Easter. These include, almsgiving, fasting and prayer. We wrote about some of ways we will be preparing such as giving up something, remembering to pray a little bit more.

We have been reflecting on the symbolism of Lent, such as the crosses made on our heads on Ash Wednesday and the palms waved and laid out in honour when Jesus was welcomed into Jerusalem.

St Patrick’s Day

On Wednesday we thoroughly enjoyed celebrating St Patrick’s Day. We learnt about St Patrick’s life. We made rainbow hats and shamrock cards. We tried some traditional Irish dancing (tricky but fun). We ended the day sitting in the sunshine trying a variety of green foods! These included: celery, minted peas, kiwi fruit, lime wedges and a rainbow sweet. 

We learnt all about the Trinity in RE St. According to Patrick's Day lore, Patrick used the three leaves of a shamrock to explain the holy trinity: that in the one God there are three divine beings: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.

St Joseph’s Day

The day started with a lovely collective worship and lots of lots of learning about St Joseph. The children made a cross with facts and thoughts on. radition is that the children have treats i the afternoon which this year came in the form of a reptile zoom workshop and an ice lolly!

Easter

The children enjoyed learning about Holy Week. Year 1 retold the story of Palm Sunday with Reception and Year 2.

Stations of the Cross

It was a lovely sunny day to learn about stations of the cross on the school field, helped by Year 6.

The last day of term was full of Easter basket making, Easter card making, writing Easter prayers and a very exciting visit from a little fluffy visitor!

Maths

In Maths, we have been thinking about one more and one less than with 2-digit numbers. We have used number squares to help us. We have also been comparing groups of objects and consolidating our understanding of comparative language. More than, greater than, less than, fewer and equals.

Next we began to count objects in pairs and to count forwards and backwards in 2s. and 5s. We have used ten frames, 1-50 grid and number tracks to help with our understanding of this.

Let’s Count Day

We have been discussing the UK Census and decided to carry out our own investigations on Let’s Count Day. Our Sxhool Council representatives sent a letter to all the classes to ask what pets they owned. We collated the data into tally charts and bar charts. Would you believe at St Joseph’s the children own 54 cats and 54 dogs! We also took a survey to see how much traffic passed the zebra crossing in 10 minutes. We filled in frequency tables and made bar charts to show this information. 

Geography

We have been learning about the United Kingdom, which is made up of 4 different countries. Each of these countries has its own capital city and flag. The combination of the crosses on these flags make up the Union Jack, the national flag of the United Kingdom.  We learned a song to remember the capital cities in the UK.

In Topic we have been learning about the different seas surrounding the United Kingdom these are: the English Channel, the North Sea, the North Atlantic Ocean and the Irish Sea. 

Science

In Science we have been learning about the diets of different animal groups. We have learnt that Carnivores like newts and cats eat meat. Herbivores such as horses and elephants eat a plant based diet. Omnivores eat both meat and plants-pigs, bears and most birds fall into this category. 

Also see science week above.

Spring Term 1

RE

In RE we have been thinking about families and celebrations. We thought about the importance of spending time with our families (especially at the moment!) and the types of things we do such as playing games or watching a film.

We learned about Jesus in the Temple and used role play and puppets to retell the story. Next we thought about Candlemas. When Simeon called Jesus a ‘light’ this was the inspiration for the celebration of Candlemas (February 2nd). It was and still remains to this day a Christian celebration of the purification of Mother Mary and the first appearance of Jesus in the Temple. 

We’ve been learning about Baptism in RE. We enjoyed sharing some of the symbolic items we wore or were given at our own baptism. We reflected on why Catholics and other Christians are baptised (to welcome them into God’s family and to show that they belong to Christ. 

HIstory

History this half term is about significant people.

We have learned all about Mary Anning who is remembered as being one of the greatest fossil hunters to ever live. Over the course of her life she made many incredible discoveries. We made our own salt dough fossils. 

We learned about Martin Luther King and wrote about our dreams for our family and our world.

We learned about the explorer Neil Armstrong and craeted art work about landing on the moon.

We learned how Florence Nightingale had made a difference to health care. The children designed a medal to give to someone deserving in their life. Lots of mums and dads received the medal for home teaching!

To celebrate Chinese New Year the children learned how the animals of the Chinese Zodiac decided on who would have each year named after them. We enjoyed making Chinese lanterns and dragons and drawing an Ox for the year of the Ox.

PSHE

For Children’s Mental Health week, the children expressed themselves! This involved singing songs, dancin, exercising, walking outside looking for wildlife, having picnics in the snow and creating art to try and stay happy for Mental Health Week. Well done Y1 for all your efforts this week. We do loved seeing all of your fabulous work.

Maths

In Maths twe have consolidating our understanding of one more and one less than and comparing objects and numbers to 20 and 50.

We learned different techniques for addition and subtraction. We started to look at different representations of subtraction when crossing 10, using ten frames, part- whale models and number lines. We used the making 1o method for addition and subtraction.

We also learning about fact families. We are now able to see the relationship between additiona nd subtraction and see that they are indeed related.

English

In English we retold the story of Jack and the beanstalk, being inspired by videos and songs telling the traditional tale. The children wrote fantastic sentences to re-tell this story.

We had a week learning about persuasive writing and we wrote amzing letters to Mrs Choma, asking her to improve the outdoor space around the Year 1 classroom. The children asked for artifical grass and a roof on the courtyard so they could play and learn outside all year round, They asked for a nature garden, a vegetable patch and some sports equipment. The children’s letters were so good that Mrc Choma said YES to some of the requests. Well done Year 1.

In phonics we have been revising the split digraphs and learnign about lots of alternative graphemes for sounds as well as alternative sounds for different graphemes.

We have also been senetence building an the children had fun playing Karate Cats.

We have been learning about poetry. We learned that a poem is a form of creative writing. We discussed the rhythm of a poem and that some poems have rhyming words. We thought about some of the traditional tales we had read recently and chose one of them as a basis for our own verse of poetry.

Science

In Science, we studied the different ways that animals prepare for winter. Some animals like dormice and bats hibernate. Some, like geese and whales travel to warmer climes, this is known as migration and others adapt by growing thicker layers of fur. We focused on migration. In particular the migration of the swallow. Did you know that in autumn, the swallow will fly 6,000 miles to South Africa? This takes 6 weeks, flying up to 200 miles a day.

Autumn Term

Y1 have come to school each week with their fantastic ‘can do’ attitudes. They have worked so hard and adapted easily to the more formalised structure of Y1.

Christmas

Christmas in school was extremely festive and lots of fun. The children had fun at the Christmas party, the games afternoon, making Christmas crafts and eating Christmas dinner.

We learned about Thanksgiving and celebrated too.

RE

During our RE lesson, we thought about our wonderful world. We enjoyed lying on the grass in the glorious sunshine and pondered just how God had created all the beautiful things in our world. We wrote prayers thanking God.

We have been reflecting on the Creation Story. We have watched videos, created artwork and written in chronological order, how God created our world.

We listened to the story of Noah’s Ark and we reflected on God’s promise to Noah. When God put the rainbow in the sky to demonstrate this we listened to the story of how God made the rainbow; after each colour strived to be the only colour in the bow we learned that by using all the colours to make a rainbow we celebrate how wonderful we can be in spite of our differences.

We wrote Harvest prayers thanking God for all that he gives us. We thought about those who don’t have enough to eat and watched a short CAFOD film that helped us to understand what we can do to help. 

We have been thinking about Remembrance Sunday. We learnt about this special occasion and why we wear a poppy and described the word peace, thinking about what peace looks like, sounds like and feels like.

We also learnt about the Annunciation- the special message that Mary received from the Angel Gabriel that she would have a baby called Jesus and he would be the Son of God.

We have started to learn about advent and how we prepare for the birth of Jesus. We matched advent symbols to their meaning, wrote about the advent wreath and became advent angels.

PHSE

Year 1 got the chance to vote when we elected two candidates to be on our school council and to become our healthy food ambassadors. The children were introduced to the idea of participating in a democratic process.

We thought about how we are superheroes and designed ourselves as a superhero. We thought about their importance of making the right choices , trying our best to succeed, helping others in need, and making heathier lifestyle choices, which will make us a stronger person.

In anti-bullying week, we were united against bullying. We created a jigsaw puzzle combining our meaasges which included: teamwork is powerful, repect differences and be kind to everyone. Our odd sock day reminded us how it is good to be different.

History

With a whole school assembly to celebrate Black History month. Y1 staged a mini protest like those in the civil rights movement to remind us about the importance of treating one another with tolerance and respect. For our stamp out racism day we learnt about Rosa Parks, who in 1955, refused to give up her seat on a bus for a white person. Her actions changed American history forever.

Our classroom has a new toy shop with old and new toys where we can learn about toys through the decades, develop our maths skills by going shopping and create our own split pin toy. We learned about what children did in each decade and created a time line with toys from 1800 to 2020. We visited our own little toy museum in the classroom and were amazed at how different the toys were compared to our toys today.

Geography

This term we have learned about hot and cold places along with the weather. We compared deserts to the arctic. We learnt that a third of our planet is covered in desert! We also learnt that deserts can be hot or cold. We thought about the animals that have the desert and the arctic as their habitat. We know that the polars regions are at the North and South Pole and that the warmer areas and rain forests are located nearer to the equator.

Maths

We have been practising our number formation. We have learnt some fabulous techniques to help us remember how to form each number. One of our favourites was: Half a heart, says I love you, add a line now I’ve made 2! We also practised sorting objects into groups.

We have been counting objects to ten. We have used lots of practical resources and ten frames to help. We have also enjoyed counting with our Super Movers videos which helps us to learn maths and get our brains ready to learn. We represented the number ten in different ways and showed Mrs Choma who was very impressed.

We have been using lots of different resources to count forwards and backwards and compare numbers. Next we looked at the part whole model to understand the relationship between the whole number and it’s component parts. 

It is number bond time! Children have been learning number bonds to 6,7,8,9 and 10 using number grids, counters and systematic patterns.

English

We have been listening to the story Meerkat Mail about Sunny the Meerkat. We wrote sentences describing the different things that Sunny liked doing in his family of meerkats. Then something very exciting happened! We received a letter from Sunny and he would like us to write back to him. So that Sunny will be very impressed with our letters, we have been learning to form each letter correctly with rhymes. Sunny said that he would like to visit England and come to our school but he is not sure if his mummy and daddy will let him after his last adventures! Sunny sent us a meerkat which was so exciting and we called him Marvin. We showed Marvin around school and he took part in our lessons. Miss Hulbert took him home to meet her kitten too. We sent Sunny postcards to let him know what Marvin had been doing.

Our next book is Send for a Suoerhero. Taking inspiration from this book, we compiled a list of compound words by completing a sorting activity. We thought of exciting adjectives to describe our own superheroes. We created a superhero to defeat the baddies called Filth and Slime and wrote letters asking for theit help.

Finally we read the book, The Christmas Present and used actions and story mapping to retell the words of Father Christmas. The children invented imaginative ways for Father Christmas to get back to the North Pole including a zip wire and hitching a ride on a eagle!

PE

During the Autumn term, we developed our skills to jump, run, throw and catch and move around. At the end we completed circuts to demonstarte our skills.

We really enjoyed our dance PE lessons. We became animals from the Lion King- monkeys, crocodiles, elephants and lions. Using beats of eight, we created animal movements. We then put together a whole class amazing dance routine by working together with the music.

Science

We are learning about seasons. We craeted pictures to show how we identify the four seasons of the year. To study Autumn, we collected lots of lovely Autumn leaves, conkers and pine cones on our walk last week and in Science we were able to use our autumn identification chart to tick off what we had managed to find, this included: sycamore, oak, horse chestnut, silver birch, beech and ash just within the grounds of our school. We made some lovely autumn animal pictures with the leaves we found in Art.

We sponsored a tree in the school grounds which we will describe each season. We finished our Science unit on seasons by learning about the months of the year and which months go with the seasons. We have learnt that each season is 3 months long and what happens to the weather as we move into each new season.