English Year 1 first term 21-22

Dear families,

We wanted to share with you what we have been doing in Year 6 this first term.

We start the classes with the “Hello, hello, can you clap your hands?” by Super Simple Songs. We greet each other and move to the beat of the song and move around doing our daily routines. We start off the day looking at what day it is today, what day it was yesterday, and what day it will be tomorrow placing the days on our manipulative calendar. To learn the days of the week, we say the days with different voices (e.g. in a low voice, whispering to our partner, shouting it out, etc.). Then, we look at the weather and indicate it in our weather wheel. 

We have started this term by reviewing the numbers with different interactive games that have helped us to settle the numbers. We danced to the song "Let's count to 20" by Dream English Kids. During the sessions there were brain breaks with different activities and songs such as "Hop Little Bunnies", "Dingle Dangle Scarecrow", "Dance Freeze" or "Winter Freeze Dance".

In September, we started the teaching unit of The Enormous Turnip, a story that tells the story of a group of people who have to help each other to pick up a turnip. With this story, we introduced the family vocabulary and did various activities related to the book. For example,  games to find differences, the odd one out, role-playing the story, and so on. To work on the family vocabulary, we made a lapbook with different flashcards of the vocabulary worked on. The children were able to play with each other using memories (putting the flashcards of two lapbooks together) or guessing the word using fly swatters.

Halloween came in October and we worked on different elements and vocabulary of the holiday through the song we prepared for the school party "Baby Shark Halloween". Also, we worked on the story "Room on The Broom." We loved doing dragons, flying like witches and wizards and working on the story through the game. We also worked on the holiday season, in which the boys and girls did autonomous learning proposals. For example, we loved using talking tins, which are talking cans that repeated to us the vocabulary they had drawn on them so we could practice it. Also, working on the vocabulary with the playdough mats that our teachers prepared for us. Another activity was to look for differences between pictures in which there was Halloween vocabulary.

In November, we revised the family vocabulary we had learned with The Gingerbread Man. This beautiful story helped us to revise vocabulary and also to re-introduce, in this case, animals. We worked on body parts from the gingerbread man working on different songs such as Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes. We researched what ingredients were needed to make gingerbread cookies. To do this, we experimented with ginger, with its smells and textures. Then each of us was able to create our own gingerbread with Jumping Clay and different elements to make different parts of the body, such as the eyes, nose, mouth, and so on. Then we did a Gingerbread Man museum to see all of our classmate’s creations. Continuing with this topic, we wanted to do an experiment to see what happened to the Gingerbread Man when we put him in different types of liquids. We investigated what happened when we put a gingerbread cookie in water (pretending to be the river), salt water (pretending to be the sea), oil, and vinegar. We made our hypothesis and we were able to test them. We looked at the reactions and refuted the hypothesis we had made. We discovered that when we put a gingerbread cookie in oil, it doesn’t melt and is still crispy. It was amazing! Finally, we played a board game that had the topic of the book.

This December, we have been practicing the song "S-A-N-T-A" which we will sing this Christmas. We also worked on a Christmas story called “Stickman”. Finally, we celebrated La Mar Bella’s Christmas Jumper Day, wearing a Christmas sweater and contributing to a solidarity project with our neighbourhood.