Our beginning topic, Journeys, has allowed us to explore the different ways that people take journeys or trips by air, sea, space and land. Our first week back at school, we looked into journeys by land and the inventions of the wheel.
Did you know that a long time ago people rode bicycles that had a humongous wheel in the front and one small wheel in the back? They were called ‘high-wheelers’ or the ‘penny farthing’.
While investigating the different ways that people travel on land, the children started their BIG Design Technology project—making a moving vehicle.
After learning about the different ways to travel on land, we rocketed into learning about traveling through space, particularly through rockets and stars. We used the book ‘How to Catch a Star’ to brainstorm different ways to catch a star and then used water-colours to paint what a star might see as it looked down at planet Earth. The children only used the colours blue and green and worked very carefully to make sure they didn’t blend them.
Next, as we started to learn about shapes in Numeracy, we moved on to making rockets using 2D tangram pieces. They children had already learned to make a star using one triangle piece but now had to opportunity to make a whole rocket ship only using 2D shapes. They carefully traced around their shape, sketched the pointy bits and then sensibly coloured their picture to highlight all their shapes.
Wow! It’s been a busy three weeks! So much learning, exploring and fun is happening in Year 1. What will we be investigating next?