Dear Parents,

It has been wonderful to welcome all the children back to school this week and into Year 1. They have quickly settled into their new routines, become familiar with their new teachers and are already feeling at home in their classroom environment.

This week, we spent time sharing our holiday news and talking about the ways we are all connected – our likes, our strengths, and what makes each of us special. The children drew pictures of something they like to do and wrote a sentence to go alongside their work. This gave us a lovely insight into their interests.

As part of the schoolwide initiative, we also explored what it means to be a mensch (a good and kind person). In Year 1, we discussed different scenarios and thought carefully about whether the behaviours shown were ‘mensch-like’ or not.

We reviewed our phonic sounds and were very impressed with how much the children remembered! They also enjoyed eating the school lunches, spending time in the playground, and meeting their Year 6 buddies both during playtime and in assembly. Sitting with their buddies in assembly gave them a reassuring start and their buddies were able to show them the place in their siddur during tefillah. The children have also enjoyed singing songs with Mr Sumroy as well as hearing him blow the Shofar everyday.

In our first JS lessons in Year 1, the children looked at all the Aleph Bet letters that they had learned and they then took turns playing Aleph Bet games on the smartboard. The children enjoyed our discussion around the Parasha  (Ki Teitze) where they learned about the Mitzvah of Hashavat Aveidah- returning lost objects. 

To kickstart our English learning, we are going to have a lesson all about HATS. We would love for the children to have the opportunity to try on lots of different hats. Please try to send in a variety of hats (summer, winter, shul, flat caps etc) to school on MONDAY for our English lesson. Please can you ensure that all hats are clearly named so we know who to return them to at the end of the day. Many thanks for your support with this.

We hope the children have been coming home happy and excited and we cannot wait for our first full week together in Year 1.

We look forward to seeing parents at the Meet the Teacher evening on Tuesday. 
 

Shabbat Shalom

The Year 1 Team