We have made a great start to the new half term in year one and have quickly settled back into our learning!
We began the week by recapping our new Behaviour Curriculum – the Merry Hill Way. In our classes we revised our core rules of Ready, Respectful and Safe and reminded ourselves of what these core rules look like in our classroom, the playground, the dining hall, the forest etc. We also talked about what the adults would be looking out for when awarding team points this week – ‘We are welcoming to everyone at Merry Hill’. The Year 1 children were great at doing this as we welcomed visitors to our school for the Merry Hill Tours at the start of the week.
In our Maths lessons this week, we have been learning about ‘Think 5’. We began by thinking about all the different ways we know how to make 5.
We learned that 5 is a friendly number as it can help us when solving calculations. For example, the tens frame below shows a row of 4 yellow counters and 3 red counters. We have been using addition number sentences to show how many counters there are altogether, 4 + 3=7.
The ‘think 5’ method means we look for a way to make 5 in our calculation. We do this by moving one of the red counters to the top row so that we can clearly see there are 5 counters. We can also see that there are still 2 red underneath, So using the ‘think 5’ method, our calculation would be 4+1+2 =7.
How to help at home:
- Ask your child to draw or write about what being Ready, Respectful and Safe might look like at home.
- Encourage your child to talk about what being Ready, Respectful and Safe looks like when they are walking along the street, in the park, etc.
- Collect five objects and encourage your child to group the objects to show how we can make 5 in different ways, e.g. 4 and 1.