Week Beginning 22nd April 2024

This week we enjoyed a fantastic music lesson where we composed melodies inspired by the music 'Interstellar' by Hanz Zimmer. We also began writing our newspaper reports, which are looking fabulous! We cannot wait to read them to other pupils in school. 

Week Beginning 15th April 2024

This week in Blwyddyn Un we have been learning about the 1969 moon landing. We became journalists and began researching facts about the event. We also spent time discussing the features of a newspaper report as next week we will begin to write our own based on the moon landing. We also enjoyed becoming astronauts and spending time in our very own International Space Station! We spent time using the chrome books this week. We are becoming familiar with logging into our Hwb accounts independently. We ended our week with a PE lesson where we focused on ball control. 

Year 1 class booklet for Summer term 2024:

This booklet details what children will be learning this term and how parents can support their children's learning at home:

Week Beginning 8th April 2024

We have had a wonderful first week back. We are very excited to get stuck into our new topic, which this term is Space. We started the topic by reading the non-fiction book 'Meet the Planets'. We discovered lots of amazing facts about the solar system and even created our own planets using paint and pippettes. The pippettes helped the colours to swirl together and create amazing effects! 

Week beginning 11th March 2024

This week we have started our Easter rotation!  We have been exploring the use of pattern and making Easter cards.  It is lovely to see how creative the children are, and how they have produced such individual interpretations of the task.

We have also been learning about positional language. We have been using 4 and 8 point compasses to navigate our way round the classroom, and will use them during our Easter Egg Hunt next week!

Have a lovely weekend everyone! 

Week Beginning 4^th March 2024

This week has been all about Farmer Duck, how goes the work?!

Miss Hood looked fabulous as the farmer and the rest of the staff dressed up as farm animals.  We had a cow, a farm dog and a barn cat!

We thoroughly enjoyed the stories and all the related learning activities.  We also got to read with other year groups in the hall.  Early Entitlement and Nursery read with year 6 and year 1 children read with Year 4.  We also had a lovely treat when Miss Walford came to read a story to the Rec & Y1 children.  A fabulous week, celebrating the joy of reading!

Week Beginning 26th February

This week we have been celebrating St. David's week.  In school we have practised and learnt a Welsh Folk Dance and some Welsh Songs: Mr Hapus ydw i and Canu Roc a Rol.  We also designed and made our own love spoons!  Congratulations to the competition winners!

Week Beginning 19th February 2024

This week in our Language, Literacy and Communication lessons, we did lots of research on penguins ready for us to start writing our penguin information leaflets next week. Did you know that the largest species of penguin is called an emperor penguin, and the smallest species is called the little blue penguin? We discovered lots of fascinating facts about penguins. In Maths and Numeracy, we began our new unit of work 'Shapes and Patterns'. 

Week Beginning 5th February 2024

This week we moved away from farm animals and have focused our learning on arctic animals. We started the week by reading the book 'The Emperor's Penguin'. We became scientists for the day when we were tasked with freeing the emperor penguins from a block of ice. We made sensible predictions about how we could melt the ice carefully and what might work best. We used the egg timers to discover what might work the quickest. It was very interesting! 

In our Language, Literacy and Communication lessons, we have been further exploring the features of non fiction texts, specifically information leaflets. When we return to school after our half-term break, we will be writing our own information leaflets about penguins. How exciting!

We ended our half-term with a PE lesson where we danced and danced! We are becoming very good at following a set of sequences to create a dance! 

Happy half-term everyone.  

Home learning for 8th February 2024:

Week Beginning 29th January, 2024

In our topic lessons this week we have spent time in our outdoor areas investigating all the micro-habitats on our school grounds. We also explored world habitats and discussed which types of animals would live in each one. 

In Language, Literacy and Communication, we continued with our poetry. We looked at the features of a rhyming poem and, in small groups, wrote our own!They are superb and are full of lots of rhyming words! 

We have also been busy learning the names of farm animals in Welsh. We have been using the puppets in our farm role play area to rehearse our Welsh language skills. 

Week Beginning 22nd January 2024

It has been yet another busy week in Blwyddyn Un. We continued with our focus of farm animals and discussed the various jobs that farmers do. We looked at the vegetables that are grown on farms and measured their length and weight using non-standard units. We also made our own butter! We made predictions about what might happen during the butter making process, and carefully observed as the liquid cream began to solidify and turn into butter. We then enjoyed eating the butter on crackers as part of our snack. It was delicious! 
 

In our Language, Literacy and Communication lessons we have been focusing on rhyme. We are going to write our own rhyming poem based on a farm animal of our choice! We planned our poems this week and will begin to write them next week. Very exciting. 
 

In Mathematics and Numeracy, we have been focusing on subtraction. We have been subtracting numbers within 10 using the counting on and counting back method. 
 

Penwythnos Hapus pawb! 
 

Week Beginning 15^th January 2024

This week we have started our learning rotation about farm animals.  We read the book Farmyard Hullabaloo and considered animals that would live on a Farm.  We have made animals for the Penarlag Farm role play area, carefully thinking about what materials, tools and resources to choose to create the effects that we wanted.  We thought about good describing words and have used these in our play and in our writing.

In PE we created a farm with the large apparatus, moved in different ways to develop our balance and coordination skills.

Have a lovely weekend!

Class booklet for Spring Term 2024:

Week Beginning 8^th January 2024

Happy New Year to all!

It has been lovely to see all the children again after the exciting Christmas break, and we welcome 3 new children to the Nursery.

This week we have been supporting the RSPB Big School’s Bird Watch 2024.  We made bird feeders and placed them around the school grounds.  We then took the binoculars we made and went bird watching!  We saw quite a few birds, mostly Blackbirds and Herring Gulls, and had a fabulous time exploring the school grounds.  Over the coming weeks we will continue watching for the different birds that visit out bird feeders and count them very carefully.  We will then submit our results to the RSPB to support their research and help look after the birds. 

This year we have also signed up to take part in the RSPB’s award scheme and will be trying our best to achieve the Bronze Award!

Have a lovely weekend!

Week Beginning 18th December 2023

Well it has been a busy but magical week in school. We had a visit from a very special visitor who gave us all a gift. We could hear his bells as he was on his way! We also had a wonderful party day. We enjoyed a Christmas breakfast, played games, did lots of disco dancing and watched a movie! Fun was had by all!

We ended 2023 with a trip to Rhyl to watch this years pantomime 'Jack & the Beanstalk'. Oh no we didn't!...Oh yes we did! 

We wish all of our families a very Merry Christmas and a prosperous New Year!

Week Beginning 11^th December 2023

It has been a very busy week this week.  We have had three days of our Christmas performance ‘The Christmas Tree Nativity’.  One performance for all the children in school and two performances for families.  The children were fabulous!  With lots of smiles and beautiful singing, they really did give it their all, with a lot less time for rehearsals than in previous years.

This Friday we also held our Christmas Fair, the lucky dip and Christmas tattoos were very popular. 

Thank you to all the families of Penarlâg for your support!  Have a lovely weekend.

Week Beginning 4th December 2023

This week, Christmas has most definitely arrived!  The learning areas have been transformed by Christmas magic and everything glitters or sparkles! We have enjoyed writing Christmas cards, wrapping presents, making paper chains and even creating Christmas sand castles! 

We have been reading the book ‘Jesus’ Christmas Party’. We have re-enacted parts of the story in our role play area and have started to write the story with our own twist!

It has also been a pleasure to welcome visitors to the school this week! We have been only too happy to tell them all about our learning and life at Penarlâg!

We look forward to welcoming our families to school next week to watch our Christmas performance ‘Christmas Tree Nativity’!
 

Have a lovely weekend!

Week Beginning 27th November 2023

Oh what a wonderful week we have had in school! We started our Christmas play rehearsals and we have been ever so excited to show off our acting skills! We know it takes a lot of courage to stand on a stage in front of an audience. We cannot wait for you to watch our performance!  

Penwythnos hapus pawb! 

Week Beginning 20th November 2023

Well, it has been another busy week in Blwyddyn un. We have spent a lot of time learning outdoors this week.  As part of our Topic lessons, we went on a walk around our school field to carry out some scientific observations. We have been learning about deciduous and evergreen trees, and used the trees in our field to observe and identify their features. As part of our Health and Well-Being sessions, we spent time in our outdoor area. We created lots of different things such as leaf crowns, mini beast houses and smelly potions! In Language, Literacy and Communication, we finished writing our informal letters. They are superb! We are becoming such fantastic writers in Year 1! In Mathematics and Numeracy, we have been continuing with our unit of work 'Addition within 10'. 

Oh! And we also started our Christmas production this week! We spent time discussing the play and decided together which part we would all like to have. It is very exciting!

Penwythnos hapus pawb! 

Week Beginning 14th November 2023

This week we have started our next piece of writing. We have been reading the book The Little Red Hen. We have used lots of actions to help us re-tell the story, and have worked in groups to sequence the events correctly using flashcards. During our Pupil Voice session, we decided to each write a letter to Miss McGill from the view point of the Little Red Hen as Miss McGill is unaware of what went on at the farm! We have been looking at the features of an informal letter and began our writing on Thursday. We will finish writing our letters next week and post them through Miss McGill's door! 

Week Beginning 6th November 2023

It has been a great first week back! For the next few weeks, we will be learning all about Autumn. We began our Autumn topic by going on an autumn walk around our school grounds. We  collected lots of different autumnal objects. We discussed the differences between the objects and sorted them using a Venn diagram. We took notice of the colours around us and used them as inspiration during our expressive art lesson. We created some beautiful autumn mood paintings inspired by the art work of Glenys Cour MBE, an artist from Wales! 

Week Beginning 23rd October 2023

This week we have been looking at a range of fiction and non-fiction books. We have been comparing their features and discussing the purpose of non-fiction books. We read a variety of non-fiction books to find out information about toys from the past and how they have changed over the decades. 
 

It has been work awareness week in school. We have focused on ‘people who help us’. We discussed the job roles of different people in our community who help us, such as; doctors, vets, firefighters and police officers. 
 

We also enjoyed a lovely well-being session. We found a treasure box and inside the box was someone very special! We each opened the box, carefully looked inside and thought of some words to describe the very special person inside! Can you guess who was inside the box? 
 

Enjoy the half-term everyone! 

Week Beginning 9th October 2023

Another busy week in Blwyddyn Un. This week, as part of our Language, Literacy and Communication lessons we started planning our next piece of writing. We will be writing a character description based on the character of Blue Kangaroo from the lovely book I love you Blue Kangaroo. We spent lots of time talking about adjectives and how they can be used to describe Blue’s appearance and personality. We also thought of many adjectives that do not describe Blue, such as horrible, nasty and rude. Blue Kangaroo is certainly none of those! 

In Science and Technology, we explored materials and their properties. We looked at lots of different toys which were all made out of different materials. Next week, we will link this to our Maths unit of work and sort the materials using the part whole method. 
 

We have also been using lots and lots of Cymraeg! Our Welsh phrase of the week was ‘syniad da’ which means good idea! We had so many syniadau da that Miss Hood could not keep track of them all! We even reminded Miss Hood of the phrase when she said she had an idea! 

Ardderchog pawb! 
 

Week Beginning 2nd October 2023

This week, we read the lovely story 'I love you Blue Kangaroo'. As part of our Language, Literacy and Communication lessons, we discussed the story in detail and re-told it from Blue Kangaroo's point of view. In our Mathematics lessons, we continued working on our unit of work 'Number Bonds to 10'. We have been learning a song, along with some actions, to help us remember all of the number bonds to 10! We ended the week with our PE lesson. We had lots of fun doing gymnastics! 

Have a lovely weekend Blwyddyn 1! 

Week Beginning 25th September 2023

This week Year 1 began writing the stories they planned last week. They are fantastic and have been a pleasure to read! We also began our new unit of work in our Maths lessons - number bonds to 10! 

Week Beginning 18th September 2023

We started the week off by reading the book 'Goldilocks and the Three Bears'. We discussed all of the different ways we could re-tell the story. During our Topic lessons, we got out a variety of craft materials and created wooden spoon puppets! We made a Goldilocks, a Daddy Bear, a Mummy Bear and a Baby Bear puppet and put them into our Cosy Cottage active learning area. We can use the puppets to re-tell the story to each other. We even worked together to re-write the story and create our own floor book! 

As part of our Language, Literacy and Communication lessons we had lots of discussions about the story of 'Goldilocks and the Three Bears' and even thought of actions to help us remember and re-tell the story. We agreed it would be a great idea to re-write the story using our own characters! We began to map out and plan our stories in preparation for writing them next week. We have lots of interesting titles such as; 'The Dragon and The Three Cats', 'Princess Aurora and the Three Witches' and 'The Mermaid and the Three Soldiers'. We cannot wait to read them to each other once we have finished writing them! 

In our Mathematics lessons, we have continued to focus on creating number patterns to 20. We will begin our new unit of work 'Number Bonds' on Monday. We also spent time learning number words to ten. 

Da iawn Blwyddyn 1!

Miss Hood. 

Class booklet for the Autumn Term 2023:

This booklet contains information about what your child/ren will be learning and how you can help at home.

Week Beginning 11th September 2023

It has been another busy week in Year 1. The children have worked ever so hard and I am very proud of them as always!

As part of our Language, Literacy and Communication lessons we have been learning all about the author Roald Dahl. It was his birthday on Wednesday and we discovered that he would have been 107 years old! We learnt lots of interesting facts about him. Did you know he liked chocolate but did not like chocolate cake or chocolate ice-cream? We each wrote a fact sheet about him and tried hard to remember to use capital letters and full stops in our sentences. 

Our Topic this term is Toys & Tales. At the beginning of the week, during our Pupil Voice session, we thought about what we would like to learn about toys. We decided we would like to design our own toy and make it ourselves! We thought carefully about the type of toy we would like to make and got to work designing it on a piece of paper. We discussed what kind of materials might work best and which ones might not work so well! Once we made our toys, we decided to sell them in our 'Penarlag Toy Shop' active learning area! 

In our Mathematics lessons, we have been ordering and creating number patterns to 20.

Have a lovely weekend. 

Miss Hood.

Welcome to Year 1 2023-24! 

It has been an absolute delight to welcome the children back to school this week. They seem to have grown up so much over the summer and I have loved hearing all about their summer adventures! The children all settled back into school quickly and I can see that they are ready for the year ahead in Year 1. 

This week, we have focused some of our work on 'All About Me'. The children each created a booklet detailing their likes and dislikes. They shared their work with each other and it was lovely finding out our similarities and differences. We have also been busy creating number lines for our Maths display. Some children created number lines counting up in ones and twos and some challenged themselves by counting up in tens! 

I hope the children all have a relaxing weekend after completing their first week in Year 1!

Miss Hood. 

Week ending 7th July 2023

This week the children have been busy completing assessments.

It has been pleasing to see how much all of the children have progressed throughout the year.

Da iawn blwyddyn un,

As well as being busy showing how much we have learnt, during our Language, Literacy and Communication lessons the children have begun writing their own stories. They are going on an adventure to save the world!!

In our Mathematics and Numeracy lessons we have begun working on comparing and measuring length.

Which is the longest? Or shortest?

Keep up the fantastic work Blwyddyn un.

Wednesday 28th June

Today Year 1 went on our school trip to Wepre Park. We completed activities including a minibeast safari and pond dipping. We managed to see lots of wildlife including newts and a dragonfly nymph. A big thank you to Mike the Ranger at the park. We all had a brilliant day, the children were superstars and a credit to our school! 

Week beginning Monday 22nd May:

Da iawn Blwyddyn 1, you were amazing this morning for our class assembly 'Together we can change the world', we were so proud of you all!

This week in Language Literacy and Communication we have been creating our own poems using alliteration. 

In Maths and Numeracy this week we have been comparing and arranging numbers in order.

We hope you have a lovely half term break and we will see you back in school on Tuesday 6th June. 

Mrs Davies and Mrs Holden. 

Week beginning 15th May 2023:

We've had a busy week in Year 1 practising for our assembly. Here's a sneaky peek for next week!

Week beginning 1st May

It may have been a 4 day week this week, but it has been a busy week with lots of activities.

In our Language, Literacy and communication lessons the children have been using alliteration and onomatopoeia. 

In Mathematics and Numeracy we have begun to look at partitioning numbers in to tens and ones.

We also had a lovely day on Friday wearing blue, red and white clothes to celebrate the coronation of King Charles III. In the afternoon we learnt how to draw a portrait of him by following a live lesson.

Have a lovely weekend and we hope you enjoy your coronation celebrations. We shall see you on Tuesday 8th May.

Year 1 class booklet for Summer term 2023:

Week beginning 17th April 2023

Welcome back to school after the Easter break.

This week we have begun to think about our new topic ‘Tomorrow’s World’ and what we would like to learn. We worked with our friends to compete a ‘What we know’ and ‘What we would like to know’ activity.

We have also enjoyed exploring our new outdoor sand and water areas.

A big thank you to FOPS for buying the trays for us.

Week beginning 27th March

Year 1 have had a busy week completing our assessments this week. They have worked very hard and should feel proud of what they have achieved.

As we are on our last week before the Easter holidays Year 1 have also been learning about the reason why we celebrate Easter and listening to the Easter story.

Look at some of the work we have completed ordering the story.

We have also created our own Easter cards.

Monday 20th March

Today the children had a wonderful time during the Celt workshop. We learned lots of new facts about the Celts and we enjoyed dressing up and painting our faces!

17th March 2023

Well it's certainly been a busy week in Blwyddyn Un! We started the week by celebrating World Book Day. This week has also been British Science Week and on Tuesday we took part in an online live Science lesson, which the children and staff thoroughly enjoyed! Today we are wearing red to raise money for Comic Relief. Year 1 will feature in this week's newsletter so watch out for further details of what we have been learning about this week.

We are very excited for our Celt workshop, in school on Monday.

Have a lovely weekend everybody! 

Mrs Davies and Mrs Holden 

Online learning for 10th March 2023:

Online learning for 9th March 2023:

September 2022

A guide to the new Curriculum for Wales:

Year 1 Class Booklet for Spring Term 2023:

Year 1 class booklet for Autumn term 2022:

Details regarding an after school football club for pupils in Years 1 to 6:

Penarlag 50

Please see documents below that explain about the 50 challenges. Can you complete any at home?

Miss McGill

The Five Ways to Well Being

Please see documents below that explain about the Five Ways to Well Being.