One Small Step for Man, One Giant Leap for Mankind!

This week our intrepid Year One time travellers stepped back into the Tardis and continued to develop an awareness of the past, using common words and phrases relating to the passing of time. We explored where the space race would fit into a chronological framework and recognised that our lives where much closer to the space race than they were to the early Mott and Bailey castles we learned about last half term. Our teachers don’t seem that old after all!

As we deconstructed the events of the space race we discussed how ethical it was to send a monkey and a dog into space, whilst also recognising how it paved the way for humans. We are so proud of level of balanced reflection demonstrated by the children.

Then we focused on the life of Neil Armstrong who contributed a huge international achievement- being the first man to walk on the moon!


We became biographers and created biographies of his life to help other learn about his achievements.

biog Ethans biog

We carefully formulated our sentences using our knowledge of Neil’s life and then used the letters and sounds that we have been learning to build words and sentences. Can you spot the phase three and four sounds and words in our work? Some of the children even connected their sentences with conjunctions such as ‘and’ and ‘because’. Neil Armstrong was a huge inspiration to us. With a relentless determination our Year One children could be their generations’ hero!

Thinking of landing on the moon drew our thoughts towards how it would feel to find ourselves on another planet. We listened to the work of Holst and explored how certain pieces made us feel. Mars- the Bringer of War was quite scary! We drew pictures of the planet that the music evoked in our minds.

Holst music

Holst’s music was massively inspirational for us and motivated us to create our own musical pieces that told a story.

Music wasn’t the only way that we told a story this week though. In Design and Technology we continued our learning on moving mechanism, so that next week we can create exciting moving pictures that can be used to either tell a space story or teach people about our solar system.

5… 4… 3… 2… 1… BLAST OFF! In maths we extended our knowledge of number and learned to recognise numbers to 100. We used our knowledge of place value to add or take away one from any given number. This will really help us next week when we move on to exploring subtraction.

maths more or less maths more or less 3 maths more or less 2

Also this week we continued our learning about how to stay safe online, focusing on cyber bullying. We presented our work to the whole school during the anti-bullying week assembly.

Anti-Bullying Assembly

So, what exciting things are coming up next week? Here are just a few things…

We will be enjoying a story from one of our favourite authors- Jill Murphy. Through drama the children will become Baby Bear from ‘Whatever Next’ and journey into space in their very own rockets. We will think carefully about what we will need to pack and learn the spelling rule for adding –s or –es as the plural maker for nouns. In maths we will be exploring subtraction and solve a range of problems using this operation. In DT the children will learn how a wheel mechanism works and then plan, create and evaluate their own moving picture against our design criteria.

*Please don’t forget that Mathletics is a fantastic fun tool that you can use at home to support your child’s maths learning. The login information for your child is inside their home-school book.*