Summer Term 2022

Hello and welcome to our Year 1 Class Page. Here you will find useful information about our class and the exciting things we will be learning this year. There is phonics, reading, spelling and maths support which might help you at home to be amazing learners and achieve everything you need to this year. 

Important messages will regularly be updated on this page so please take a look here weekly so you are aware of everything that is happening at school and in class.

Teachers

Monday-Wednesday: Mrs Price

Thursday-Friday: Mrs Syrett

Teaching Assistants

Miss Mullaney

Mrs Kelsey

Mrs Ware

Weekly timetable:

PE Days: Monday and Friday Afternoons (please label ALL PE clothing including shoes)

Monday will be Athletics with a Specialist PE teacher and Mrs Price and Friday will be Dance with Mrs Syrett.

Key Year 1 info: (Please do read this section as there are some updates)

Reading books - Please encourage your child to change their own reading colour books. Children are all working at their own paces and finishing books at different times so there is not a set time that we all change books together. Once they have finished their books, ask them to change them (we will always allow children to do so). If they are forgetting, please feel free to come and change them with them at the end of the school day!  Please note that the books the children bring home are for practising and improving  confidence. They should be reading a book to the point that they demonstrate fluency and expression before they change it. For this reason, we deliberately select colour books that will not be overly challenging. The children are challenged daily with their reading at school in phonics and throughout the curriculum and should not be struggling to decode lots of words when they read to you at home.. A way in which you can challenge your child is to ask them lots of questions about what has happened and why, how characters are feeling, and to make predictions as they read. 

The Rocket Reading Race is back this term! There will be opportunities for all children to win small prizes as they move up through the race in their reading rocket.  They must fill in one single page in the reading record at home to move up one place. The race is on!

Library books will be changed every Wednesday. Please send back any books you have at home as we are aware that we are missing several books. 

Spellings - Children will receive spellings each Friday in their spelling books to practise at home. They will then be tested on these spellings on the following Friday before receiving new ones. 

Weekend Writing Books- Please continue to encourage your child to write a sentence or two about their weekend and to return their books to school to be shared with the class. You do not need to do anything other than encourage them to sit down with their book, talk through what they might write about and then let them have a go! We want the children to work independently, and we know that they can. The children love to share their writing and we do appreciate you enabling your child to have this opportunity.

     The Great Fire of London   

Our exciting new topic is The Great Fire of London! We are arranging a trip to support this topic- details coming very soon!

In History, children will be learning about lives of men, women and children in the 17th century and comparing them to life today. They will be learning about the key events that happened in the fire and sequencing them. They will be taught about why the fire started, how it spread and how people tried to put it out. They will learn about the legacy left by the fire

In Geography, children will be learning about significant London landmarks. They will use modern maps to locate London and also map the route of the fire from its starting point in Pudding Lane.  In RE children will be exploring special things in nature, including the Christian creation story and the relationship that Christians have with nature . In PSHE they will learn about keeping safe, with a focus on safety at home (medicines, safety in the kitchen and bathroom) and road safety.  We will be thinking about people in the communty that keep us safe, particularly Firefighters. In Science we will be learning about natural and man made sources of light and how daylight changes through the day and the year in the UK.  PE this term will be Athletics on Mondays and Dance on Fridays.  In Art, children will be exploring how to mix colours and create secondary colours, shades and tints. In Computng, children will be learning about coding.

Literacy - Literacy this half term is based around our Great Fire of London topic. We will be learning the features of recounts and writing them ourselves. We will learn about the diary of Samuel Pepys in History. In Literacy we will explore a variety of example diaries and then write our own Great Fire of London diaries. This half term we will continue to focus on letter formation, using phonics to segment words they wish to spell, using finger spaces, capital letters at the beginning of a sentence and full stop at the end. We will continue to learn spelling and grammar rules for year one, including personal pronouns, time connectives and the past tense.

Maths (following White Rose scheme) - Summer Term 1: Multiplication and Division, Fractions, Position and Direction (linked to Computing)

Phonics - We will be continuing to teach whole class phonics this term, and will be continuing Phase 5. Spelling tests will continue to be on Fridays.  We are working towards the National Year 1 Phonics Screen which will be after the May half term, so please keep on practising phonics with your child at home to enable them to be confident and to reach their potential.

Homework

What can you do to help at home?

A common question is how can parents help to support their child's learning?

1. Read TO your child! The gateway to children's success is READING. Being a fluent, confident reader plays a key role in a child's learning. Although children learn to read in school through phonics and active read, do not underestimate the importance of a parent's role in developing a positive attitude to reading. First we must assist a child's love for reading by reading TO them every day. The best way of doing this is reading a story to them before bedtime each night. Switch off the technology and make it a special time that you look forward to each night. 
2. Listen to your child read every day. Encourage them to use their phonics to sound out each word then blend it together. Remember, it is not about quantity of pages read, it is about quality. Ask your child to read the same page more than once to develop confidence and fluency, point to random words on the page to see if they can read it out of context, go back and ask them to read words they struggled with to see if they now remember them, and of course, ask them questions about what they are reading to check they are understanding each sentence. These can be retrieval questions, such as 'what colour was the car?' or 'where was the cat?' or inference questions such as 'how do you think this character is feeling? or 'can you predict what might happen next?'. Even if you read only one page but over and over again, this is excellent reading practice.  Remember to write in your child's reading record book to show us what reading they have been doing at home. 
3. Spellings - practise phonics spellings and tricky word spellings each day.
4. practise 2, 5 and 10 times tables
5. Try to incorporate maths into your daily home lives, discuss the time you are doing things and ask your child to look at the clock and tell you the time (o'clock then half past);when using coins and notes, ask your child to help you select the correct coins to help them to recognise their value; when cooking or baking, ask your child to help you weigh and measure out ingredients, and when cutting or sharing food, discuss the fractions you are using, for example, ask your child to cut their sandwich in half or quarters, when they are eating it, ask them how many quarters they have eaten and how many quarters they have left. When cutting a pizza, discuss how many pieces there are and what fraction this is. 

Our Trip to Layer Marney Tower

Phonics, Spelling and Reading Support

Visit the following site to practice spellings related to the phonemes above. Children can complete interactive spelling tests and games to help with their phonics learning.

https://spellingframe.co.uk/spelling-rule/1/Year-1

Reading: Oxford Owl

The link below takes you to the website 'Oxford Owl' which has hundreds of free e-books for children to read. You can select a suitable book using the coloured book bands that we have in school. They also have a range of free phonics books, teaching slideshows and Read Write Inc phonics worksheets to support your child with their phonics learning. I'm really impressed with their selection so please use these excellent free resources. 

E-book Library

https://www.oxfordowl.co.uk/for-home/find-a-book/library-page/?view=image&query=&type=book&age_group=&level=&level_select=book+band+8%3A+purple&book_type=&series=#

Phonics e-book library

https://www.oxfordowl.co.uk/home/reading-site/find-a-book/library-page?view=image&series=Read+Write+Inc.

Phonics Worksheets and Slideshows

https://home.oxfordowl.co.uk/reading/reading-schemes-oxford-levels/read-write-inc-phonics-guide/

Maths Support

Count in 2's, 5's and 10's with Mrs Price