Hello children, parents and carers!
We’ve had an exciting and hands-on start to the week in Year 1 as we’ve launched our brand-new Design and Technology (DT) unit – all about fruit kebabs! The children in Lion Class and Panther Class have been busy learning the skills they’ll need to safely prepare food and will be working towards making their very own delicious and healthy fruit kebabs for their final product.
🍓 Safe Cutting Skills 🍌
This week, we began learning how to cut safely using real kitchen tools. We introduced our ‘Word of the Day’ – slice – and explored what it means and how to do it safely. The children were full of brilliant ideas and showed great enthusiasm and maturity when learning about knife safety.
Here are the three golden rules they came up with:
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Bridge Hold – Use a bridge hold with the knife blade pointing down (never up!) to cut between your fingers safely.
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Claw Grip – Tuck your fingers under in a claw shape to keep them safe while slicing.
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Tidy Workspace – Always keep your chopping area clear and clean so there’s nothing to trip over or get distracted by when holding a knife.
It’s been wonderful to see the children so engaged in practising these skills with care and confidence!
👨🍳 Tips to Help at Home: Extend DT Learning in the Kitchen
Here are some simple ways you can support and reinforce this learning at home:
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🍎 Let your child help prepare a snack using a child-safe knife (supervised) – try cutting bananas, strawberries, or cucumber.
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🍊 Talk through knife safety as they cut – encourage the bridge hold and claw grip techniques they’ve learned.
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🥝 Create a fruit face or pattern together using different sliced fruits – this helps with both creativity and fine motor skills.
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🍇 Set up a ‘mini chef’ station with a chopping board and a few fruit pieces for your child to practise their skills.
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🍍 Use real kitchen vocabulary like “slice,” “chop,” “careful,” and “sharp” to build understanding and confidence.
📚 Link to English:
Encourage your child to write a simple recipe list for their ideal fruit kebab. What fruits would they include? How would they prepare them? This helps build sentence structure and vocabulary around food preparation.
➗ Link to Maths:
Practise slicing fruits or vegetables into halves at home. Talk about how each piece needs to be equal and count how many pieces they make. “If we cut 1 apple in half, how many pieces do we have?”
Thank you for your continued support at home – we can’t wait to see the children’s final fruit kebab creations and celebrate all the practical and tasty learning along the way!
Best wishes,
Miss Bates & Miss Honnor