Year One newsletter Spring Term 1 - 2025

Welcome back everyone – we hope your New Year has got off to a great start! Since we’ve been back we have been learning more about the parts of our brains that control our focus, memories and emotions. Armed with this knowledge we have been revisiting our mindful breathing techniques, ready to start the New Year with optimism and gratitude. The children have been writing their hopes, dreams and goals for 2025.

Our learning theme this term will be ‘By the Sea and Pirates’. This will inspire our work and we will be looking at the books ‘The Treasure of Pirate Frank’ by Elspeth Graham and Mal Peet and ‘The Pirates Next Door’ by Jonny Duddle. We will be finding out about what pirates wore as well as what they did on their ships. We are very excited to meet some ‘real’ pirates at our pirate workshop. How exciting to be a pirate for the day!

In our Learning Journeys in the afternoons, we will be looking at similarities and differences of coastal locations in Geography. Complementing our pirate theme, we will compare our local coast of Eastbourne to a more tropical location. We will find out about the historical figure Grace Darling, looking closely at her story and how she impacted on sea rescue we have today. We will also be doing lots of crafts and activities all about pirates and under the sea.

In maths we will be continuing our work on addition and subtraction using a range of resources to support us. We will also be learning about 3D shapes and halves.

This term we will be sending home spellings for your child to learn for a weekly spelling test. The first words are purposely simple and the same for everyone as we want the children’s first experience of spellings to be a rehearsal of listening, learning where to write the word etc. This will prepare them for the weeks to come when they will be given spellings appropriate to their stage of development. Thank you all once again for your support and we look forward to this exciting half term.

The Year One Team