year 2 teacher needs inspiration for year 1's on transition day!

[conistonoldwoman]

Any suggestions for activities for new children coming up. Something involving work which can be displayed in September.
A mixture of number, writing and art tasks with a linked theme?
Thank you.

Not a teacher, but Autumn Leaf Theme: Turning over a new leaf/ new beginnings seems pretty obvious...

Have children make leaves (I think Baker Ross/ Yellow Moon do some pre-made leaves) or indeed have children collect real leaves and use solar paper/ sun print paper to capture silhoette of leaves. Ferns are really beautiful for this. [discussing how this process works is a nice bit of science as well]

All our teachers here discuss what the year is going to be like and then usually ask the children to write three things they'd like to learn more about:

1. A thing they've never done before
2. A thing they want to get better at
3. A thing they love to do and want to do again

Have children write it out on leaf paper or pre-printed paper with autumn design.

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Have children put their birthdays on leaves and then work in groups of 10 to put their leaves in chronological order.

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You can also dip a number of leaves gathered from the playground in different paints (best poured out in advance into shallow plastic plates) and then place paint-side down on paper. Use a newspaper/ old TES magazines/ job adverts to press the leaves down to the paper to make an interesting image of autumn leaves (use autumn colours).

You can use the leaves papers to do all sorts of good work:

Review times tables - answers on leaves please! Or print leaves out in advance with answers to 2, 5 and 10 times tables & have children hold up leaves if they have the right answer. If you're very keen you can play 2/5/10 x 12 bingo - make grids up in advance with answers and then paste image of leaf 12x on word document and use art tools to put in text boxes with answers. Use these to place over grid as you call out BINGO clues (what's 6 x 5?). Normal bingo rules otherwise apply.

Class Rules: voted on and written in best handwriting on scroll decorated in autumn leaves.

Discuss what fruits/ vegetables/ nuts are available in the autumn.

Make a tree and use children's hand prints in autumn colours for leaves.

Division: Give children a pile of leaves (control the number in advance - 24 works really well) - and ask them to share it out equally to 3, 4, 6 and 8 people. Work in groups -but start introducing early concepts of division and sharing equally.

HTH

PS - turning over a new leaf isn't really about leaves (as in trees) but leaves as in pages in a book. (more along the lines of clean slate).