Fine-Motor Skills and Dinosaurs

In Year 1, combined activities are usually a big hit! So having fun while getting a job done is always a winner. One of our focusses at the start of Year 1 is developing and polishing our fine-motor skills. Nimble fingers, strong shoulders, arms and hands that can maintain prolonged stamina are essential in order to meet the varied demands of the day. Learning to tie our own shoelaces, writing stories independently, learning different stitches in Design and Technology; the list goes on. The demand for strong fine-motor skills is high on our list.

Recently during our outdoor playtime, Year 1s were invited to enjoy a session to further develop those skills, using butter knives to chop through some succulent spinach stems. The added bonus to this activity is that they get to feed those scraps school pets! Can you say win-win? The moments spent in the pets area provides a lovely well-being opportunity. Caring for friendly animals is often calming.

In English, we are learning to retell key stories and create our own by first exploring the structure of simple stories. This week, we have been looking at story characters and story settings. We then used these ideas to create a Dinosaur-Planet display board in our classroom. We proceeded to make up our own dinosaurs, describing them in detail and adding them to this fantastic world we had been working on. Our next two tasks shall be writing a review of our display board and then creating stories about our dinosaurs by adding a plot to the settings and characters that we have. We are looking forward to reading the stories that the little people come up with, hopefully they won’t be too scary, but I am sure they will be dinotastic!