Our Year One team is currently: Mrs Imber, Miss Simpson, Mrs Pickering and Mrs White, and the classes are supported by Miss Merry and Mrs Lee, Miss Cope and Mrs Arnold.   The children may also be taught by Mr Fellows, Mrs Foster or Miss Haddon who is our KS1 cover supervisor.

Year One at Battling Brook is designed to build on our children’s developing skills of independence, curiosity and enthusiasm for learning, which have been nurtured during their journey from Pre school and Reception.               Children are part of a class team where there are clear routines and structure that allows our learners to feel safe and happy, and they are whole-heartedly supported by all adults that enter our learning environment. All of the class teachers in Year 1 work closely together to ensure consistency across the year group, so that all children have access to the same exciting opportunities.

Weaved into our lessons are teacher led inputs, exploration opportunities and the chance for children to show us their learning in different ways. They have access to a mixture of continuous provision, adult-led activities, adult-directed activities and self-initiated learning time. All adults help foster and develop the children’s problem-solving and social skills, encouraging independence. This in turn promotes adult-child interactions to be high quality and full of success. 

During the year, children have daily RML phonics and word time lessons, in addition to Drawing Club (Autumn Term) and Curious Quests (Spring and Summer terms), which have been instrumental in fostering our children’s imaginations, widening their use and understanding of vocabulary, and encouraging their love of writing.   Like Reception, we also have a selection of carefully chosen books for our ‘Super Six’ each half term. Daily reading with the teacher is so important in developing reading for pleasure as well as those comprehension skills.  In addition, we have ‘Cosy Club’ (our group guided reading sessions) where we can further develop each individual child’s fluency, comprehension skills and love for books.                           

 Maths is taught daily to enable our learners to build on their fluency skills and explore their new learning.  We ensure they are confident in using and choosing a range of manipulatives to deepen their understanding of the four operations. Challenges in provision will often have a maths focus and children love to show off their skills. We have a themed based approach to our foundation subjects, although they are taught discreetly so that children have a clear understanding of which subject they are learning about. We teach the children the skills and knowledge from the National Curriculum but we also encourage the children to explore and answer their own questions whilst in provision. Our subjects include history, geography, science, art and design and technology, PE, PSHE and computing. As part of our themes, we often include an ‘engage day’ which is designed to hook our children with the theme.  Threaded throughout the year, trips and visits are also planned to embed and enhance learning.

By the end of Year One we hope to have given the children an enjoyable and rigorous experience that has allowed them to progress as a whole child, ready for life in Year 2.