Welcome to Year 1

English

Our English unit of work this half term is based on writing a fiction 'journey tale' based on 'Paddington'. We will be focusing on describing settings.  

Year 1 Non negotiables

Please reinforce our Year 1 non-negotiables for writing at home. These are:

• Using our cursive handwriting, forming our letters correctly, starting on the line
• Sitting our letters on the line and ensuring ascending (tall) and descending (long) letters reach high/low enough. 
• Putting finger spaces in between words.
• Using capital letters at the beginning of each sentence and for proper nouns.
• Using full stops at the end of sentences.

Phonics   

We will be following the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds programme to teach phonics and reading. Phonics involves breaking words down in to the smallest units of sound and teaching children how these sounds are represented with letters. Your child will take part in phonics lessons daily which will support their reading and writing.  The reading scheme is in line with the phonics phases to give your child practice of the sounds they are learning and linked tricky words.  The books the children will bring home have prompts to support parents in their child's phonic and reading development (they can be found on the reverse of the cover). 

https://www.littlewandlelettersandsounds.org.uk/resources/for-parents/

An overview of the phase 5 graphemes children learn in Year 1

Reading

Please continue to read with your child as often as possible.  Books will be changed on a Friday. We will assess your child's reading throughout the year to ensure they are progressing.

 You will have the book at home for several evenings. Please read the book at least twice, ideally 3 times, with your child and talk about the story.  Reading the same book several times allows work on fluency and expression alongside the skills of decoding and comprehension. 

Reading Home Learning:

www.oxfordowl.co.uk - Free eBook library when you create a username and password.

Mathematics

We use White Rose Maths as the basis of all our Maths planning at Park Mead. 

This half term our unit focus is Place value to 10'.  Don't forget your children have Numbots logins and can use this to consolidate their basic number skills - the programme moves at the child's pace as they progress through the levels..  The ethos of White Rose is to ensure your child has a secure understanding of the basic number system, that can then be transferred to larger numbers.   

https://whiterosemaths.com/resources?year=year-1

Topic:

Our topic this term is 'Castles'. We will be looking at the locations or well known castles, where they are in the country and why the design was so important. 

Websites and Activities: 

Maths Websites:

https://ttrockstars.com/ - Your child will have brought home a log in for this website - it is learning times tables so please use with caution as it will be tricky. 

https://www.oxfordowl.co.uk/for-home/kids-activities/fun-maths-games-and-activities/ 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/topics/numeracy 

https://www.ictgames.com/mobilePage/ 

https://whiterosemaths.com

Phonics Websites:

https://www.youtube.com/user/breakthruchris  - Mr Thorne Network - Mr Thorne teaches the sounds with the help of Geraldine the Giraffe.

https://www.readwithphonics.com/ - Interactive games for all phases of phonics.

https://www.phonicsbloom.com/ - Phonic games linked to all phases to reinforce learning.

http://www.ictgames.com/ - Interactive games for phonics and reading.

http://www.letters-and-sounds.com/ - Link the children's learning to the correct phase and play the games to reinforce the sounds.

https://www.oxfordowl.co.uk/for-home/kids-activities/ - Various games and activities. 

Reading Websites:

www.oxfordowl.co.uk - Free eBook library when you create a username and password.

Please do try to read with your child as much as possible - sharing stories is equally as important as accessing school reading scheme texts. 

To access Reading Cloud, click here.        

Pie Corbett is the creator of the Talk4Writing scheme of work we follow in English. Here you will find suggestions for key books for each year group and activities linked to them: 

Pie Corbett's Reading Spine