As a class we work very hard but also have lots of fun learning new things!

Year 1 at Mursley is taught by Mrs Smutts, together with Year 1 teaching assistants Ms Wilson, Mrs Hewlett and Mrs Knaves.

We start our mornings with our daily Phonics session, in which we practise our phoneme recognition, blending and segmenting skills as well as reading ‘tricky words’ – words we cannot decode! We also do a Guided Reading session in small groups 3 times a week – in these sessions we work on different skills, such as decoding, prosody and comprehension.

Our morning timetable consists of Handwriting, English and Maths. In Maths, we follow the ‘Mastery’ approach, which helps children acquire a deep, long-term, secure and adaptable understanding of the subject.

We encourage the children in Year 1 to ‘move on’ their own learning through our marking scheme – ‘green for growth’ to improve their work, or ‘tickled pink’ when we are super impressed by their amazing work!

We love to celebrate the children’s successes – we award ‘raffle tickets’ throughout the week for hard work, excellent behaviour or where we have seen the children demonstrate our Christian Values. During our Celebration Assembly on Friday mornings, one lucky raffle ticket winner gets to choose a prize from the ‘lucky dip’. We also have a ‘Star of the Week’, Handwriting and Christian Values Award.

Our afternoons are filled with PE, Computing, Music, RE, Geography, History, Science, Art and Design Technology. We also do Forest School on alternate Fridays. The children have weekly homework and spellings, and they get to take a Library Book home on a Friday.

We enjoy going regular school trips and also having visitors into school to support our learning. Some of the exciting trips we have enjoyed include Waddesdon Manor, Windsor Castle and Claydon House.

Children in Year 1 also have the opportunity to join a variety of after-school clubs, such as Cooking or DT Club, Multi Skills and Football Club. These are all run onsite, by teachers and coaches.