Year 1

Welcome to Year One

Miss Taylor & Miss Westworth

In Year One we have lots of fun completing challenges and becoming independent learners. We have Read, Write Inc and Maths every morning.  We also have PE, Religious Education, Science, History, Geography, Art and Design, Design and Technology and Music.

Learning overview for this term

Year-1-Learning-Overview-Spring

Read, Write Inc

Learning to read is the most important thing your child will learn at our school. Everything else depends on it, so we put as much energy as we possibly can into making sure that every single child learns to read as quickly as possible. We want your child to love reading – and to want to read for themselves. This is why we put our efforts into making sure they develop a love of books as well as simply learning to read.

We start by teaching phonics to the children. This means that they learn how to ‘read’ the sounds in words and how those sounds can be written down. This is essential for reading, but it also helps children learn to spell well. We teach the children simple ways of remembering these sounds and letters. Ask them to show you what these are.

The children also practise reading (and spelling) what we call ‘tricky words’, such as ‘once,’ ‘have,’ ‘said’ and ‘where’.

The children practise their reading with books that match the phonics and the ‘tricky words’ they know. They start thinking that they can read and this does wonders for their confidence.

The teachers read to the children, too, so the children get to know all sorts of stories, poetry and information books. They learn many more words this way and it also helps their writing.

Films for parentshttps://schools.ruthmiskin.com/training/units/56

Reading at home

Please ensure your child brings a bag to school every day. They will be given a reading book to read at home, please fill in the reading record if you have listened to them read. Books that are given are linked to work they are currently doing in Read, Write Inc lessons and they will be changed in accordance to this. It is really important that children practice reading the same book at least three times, the first time to decode, the second time for accuracy and the third builds fluency. They need to bring their reading record and reading book to school every day. We hope to listen to every child read, in school, once a week.

Maths

In maths we follow ‘Maths No Problem!’ We work on our maths each lesson in a structured way to help us learn. Our lessons look like this:

  • Exploration –instead of ‘Let me teach you…’ as a starting point, the children explore a problem themselves to see what they already know.
  • Structured discussion – we then have a discussion to organise the findings of the exploration, compare/contrast strategies and guide them towards the most efficient strategy (or the one being learnt that day).
  • Questions to challenge thinking – we use questionning throughout the lesson; this helps the children to be independent learners and deepens their understanding. A variety of questions are used, such as: How do you know? Can you prove it? Are you sure? Is that right? What’s the same/different about? Can you explain that? What does your partner think? Can you imagine?
  • Discussion and feedback– there are opportunities to talk to a partner and explain/clarify thinking throughout the lesson.

PE

We have PE on Wednesday and Friday. Your child will need a green t-shirt, black shorts and pumps or trainers. Please ensure your child removes all jewellery, including earrings. PE kits will be sent home termly.

Celebrating Our Achievements

Every week we love to celebrate all the incredible things we have done. We look for people in our class who have shown our school values, had a fantastic attitude towards their learning and shown a super effort throughout the week.

We can’t wait to share all of our achievements with you too!