Welcome to Birch Class!
Meet our teaching team
Class teacher
Hello and welcome to Birch class. We are a fun and energetic class, full of enthusiasm for learning! Here on our class page, you will find out about a day in the life of a year 1 child at Mrs Bland’s, as well as the topics we will cover throughout the year.
We start each morning with a challenge to get our brains in gear! During our challenge time, our teachers love to hear us read before we go to collective worship. We come together for assembly 4 times per week and each week we follow a theme, like friendship.
After collective worship, we have phonics. We learn a new sound every day and practice reading the sound on its own and within words. Then, we take part in lots of fun activities to help us with our reading and spelling. We love phonics!
Next, we have maths. In maths we use lots of hands-on resources to support our learning and challenge ourselves to solve problems. We really enjoy investigating patterns and making connections in our learning.
After a fun-filled breaktime and a healthy snack, we start English. We learn how to write a range of text types and develop our handwriting and spelling. We use colourful semantics to help us build exciting sentences.
Our afternoons are varied but they always start in the same way – with our class story. Listening to our teachers read exciting books is one of our favourite parts of the day.
Throughout the week we sing and play instruments in music, investigate and experiment in science and design and create in DT. On Wednesday afternoons we do outdoor learning (forest school) and on Thursday we have a specialist PE teacher who helps us keep fit and active.
We certainly are busy in Birch class, but we have a blast!
Our topics throughout the year are:
Autumn 1 – Toys
Autumn 2 – Space
Spring 1 – Fairytales & Forest
Spring 2 – Animals
Summer 1 – Dinosaurs
Summer 2 – London
Key information:
- PE with our sports coach Danny Williams is on Thursday afternoon.
- Dance or Gymnastics is on Monday afternoon.
- Outdoor learning is on Wednesday afternoon.
We suggest that the children bring in their PE kits and outdoor learning clothes on a Monday and are left in school for the week, just in case there are any changes.
PE kit includes; navy shorts, coloured PE t-shirt (ask your child’s class teacher which house they are in), navy tracksuit top and bottoms (essential for outdoor PE), spare socks, plimsolls or trainers and ear tape. if needed.
Outdoor learning clothing includes; wellington boots, waterproof coat, and trousers.
Everyday essentials include; a book bag and water bottle. We encourage the children not to bring in big backpacks as we are limited on space in our cloakrooms.
Please ensure that all items are clearly named.
We always welcome and appreciate parental support with individual reading, outdoor learning and trips/visits so please do let us know if you would like to help out regularly or even just occasionally. If you have any expertise related to any of our topics this year and you would like to share your knowledge with the children, we would be delighted to hear from you too.
Many thanks for your continued support.
Mrs Wilby, Mrs Harlow, Mrs Marshall, Mrs Karas-Ball and Mrs Nash