The children of Year 1 have been super scientists over the last few weeks, learning all about how changing seasons bring many seasonal changes with them, including changing weather patterns, changing hours of daylight and changing trees. Focusing on the changes between autumn and winter, the children loved meeting ‘Mr Tree’ who gave a great explanation of what happens to him during the transition from autumn to winter. He explained that his leaves change colour and drop off of the branches during autumn because there is less sunlight to activate the chlorophyll in his leaves to make food for the tree so they aren’t really needed. As the chlorophyll in the leaf breaks down, other pigments start to show through and that’s why they don’t stay green- unless they are the leaves of an evergreen tree that is!

The families of Year 1 have been so engaged with the recent science home learning task and have collected so many fabulous examples of autumnal leaves. For a maths cross-curricular link, today the pupils produced a giant bar chart so that we could compare the leaves collected; the mathematical vocabulary of ‘greater’, ‘less’ and ‘equal’ was put to really good use.