Welcome to Year  1

Welcome to Year 1! I can't wait to get to know you all and for us to have lots of fun learning together. Congratulations to all of you that have completed the Summer Reading Challenge do keep sending me photographs so we can celebrate your achievements. Already you are making me proud!!

Parents and carers please collect your child from outside our classroom at the end of the day. Please let the office or myself know if there are any changes to who is picking up or if your child is going for a play date as we can not hand your child over to a different adult without the permission of parents or carers. Please note if you are picking up siblings we can arrange for them to be at one pick up point at the end of the school day.

This page has useful information about the day to day running of Class 1 and about what we get up to in our busy, happy and exciting classroom. Mrs Marshall is the year 1 class teacher and Mrs Chilton is the year 1 teaching Partner. This first half term is all about getting everyone settled into year 1 and learning our new routines, roles and responsibilities. During the first week we will agree our class charter and how we can work together to make sure our classroom is a safe and happy place to have fun and learn together.

Throughout the academic year new information, key dates and resources to support your child's learning journey are added to our class page so please visit us regularly, and follow our Twitter feed to see what we are up to. 

• In our English lessons we will continue to embed a love of reading and literature throughout the curriculum and to build on our phonics knowledge through daily phonics lessons and activities. Comprehension skills including developing and widening vocabulary, retrieval, sequencing and inference are taught through class guided reading lessons twice weekly alongside focussed grammar and handwriting lessons and each child will also be heard read each week in a smaller focused reading group.
• We will begin our new term learning about different emotions and how we can recognise and manage them through the story of, 'The Colour Monster.'
• Our second text, 'How to Wash a Woolly Mammoth,' will introduce pupils to instructional writing, verbs and adjectives through this humorous picture book.
• In the second half of the Autumn Term we will immerse ourselves in the events of The Great Fire of London before wrapping up warm to explore a seasonal adventure with Percy the Park Keeper in One Snowy Night where pupils will write their own descriptions and learn about plurals.

• Reading:

  At Archbishop Cranmer Academy we view each child's reading journey as an essential partnership between home and school. In order to practise and embed their reading skills, we would ask that all children read to an adult at home ideally daily or at least three times at week and to record this in their reading diaries. We recommend that you ask your child to tell you about their books and to re tell the story in their own words. This is often a skill that children of this age find difficult but it is vital to their progress and development as a reader. It is important to check they are understanding what they are reading not just decoding words. If you are able to do this every day just for a few minutes you will be amazed how much your children will benefit from this. At school, in addition to daily phonics sessions, we immerse the class in reading and listening to texts daily across the whole curriculum. Throughout year 1 we teach the children strategies and techniques to develop their reading skills so they are able to develop their comprehension skills through class and small group discussions and also differentiated guided reading sessions. We also wish to foster a genuine love of reading and regularly change the selection of books the children can choose to read in school.

  As well as a school de-codable reading book, and a reading for pleasure book, we may also  send home some individual words for your child to practise which will aid their sight vocabulary when they come across these words in their books.

  Once your child has read and is secure in their understanding of their reading book new books will be issued by school staff. Once they become more fluent in reading, children will be benchmarked; this is the tool we use to assess reading and comprehension and will determine a book band colour for your child. Once children have been allocated a coloured book band, a message will be sent home in their reading record diary, so it is important that they bring these, along with their books, to school every day. They will also be given a bookmark with further tips on how to support your child with their reading skills.

• A reading for pleasure book and phonics phase book will be sent home with your child each week. Your child will be given a day of the week when their books will be changed and their reading diaries checked.
• A reading reward will be help at the end of each half term to reward regular readers.
• Phonics is taught daily using the Bug Club scheme and each week digital resources linked to the sounds taught that week will be uploaded to your child's account along with ebooks with a read to me option which can be enjoyed at home.
• In Maths we will begin with Place Value and numbers to 10. We will them focus on addition and subtraction and our final topic for the Autumn Term will be Shape. Working on the 2x, 5x and 10x tables and correct number formation at home will help give your child a head start for Year 1.
• In Science lessons we will be learning about the four seasons and what happens to trees and how the  weather and hours of daylight change with the seasons. Our topic in Autumn 2 is Everyday Materials.
• In DT we will be constructing windmills
• In Geography we will be learning where in the world we live by looking at Google Earth and aerial photographs of our school and will learn to recognise and use geographical features of our local area making 3D maps of our classroom and finding and recording features in our playground using maps.
• In History we will be exploring historical questions linked to The Great Fire of London .
• In Computing we will begin by developing our keyboard skills before moving onto Digital Art and continuing to learn the importance of Esafety through activities and stories.
• In Art and Design Year 1 will explore colour mixing. We will learn about primary and secondary colours and use a variety of tools and materials to create field pictures inspired by the artist Mark Rothco.
• In Music this term, we will be exploring Pulse and Rhythm through exploring sound and singing songs and learning how to follow a simple score and keep in time.
• In PE we will be learning the fundamental skills of coordination, balance, jumping and landing.
• In RE we will be learning about Christian and Jewish festivals and bringing the Christmas story to life through the Key Stage 1 Nativity.
• In PSHE/RSE: Year 1 will be learning how to get Heartsmart in order to make healthy choices for our minds and bodies and will understand how our actions affect others and to know who we can turn to in times of need and how to be there for others.

•  .Useful information:
• Our PE lessons will take place on Tuesday afternoon where pupils will take place in a carousel of activities. We would ask that all pupils come to school in their P.E. kits on this day. Our PE will take place outside whenever possible so please ensure that your child has suitable clothing for the changing weather. We also want to utilise our wonderful outdoor area as much as possible so if you are able to make sure your child has a pair of wellingtons and a waterproof coat and/ trousers so that we can go outside all year round. You may wish to include some warmer clothing for our outdoor sessions until the weather gets warmer. Please ensure all clothing and footwear is clearly named. 
• Please may we remind parents to discourage children from bringing toys or personal belongings into class - they can get lost or broken and act as a distraction during valuable learning time.
• Chance to Shine: we love to celebrate your child's talents and achievements by giving them the opportunity to talk about what they have been up to in class. Please refer to the Chance to Shine Timetable to see which dates have been allocated to your child. Please feel free to email photographs or video clips of your child's latest achievements, new skills, sporting prowess or hobbies so we can showcase and celebrate with them.

Click below to see our Twitter feed! Keep an eye on Twitter to see our progress.

Mouse and Keyboard Skills

Use the code MK44

Phonics terminology and definitions:

Pure Sounds – pronouncing the sounds of letters and combinations of letters correctly, for example not saying ‘muh’ but ‘mmmmm’. Avoid trying to say an ‘uh’ at the end of the sound. I uploaded a video to the Facebook page showing how to pronounce the sounds in Phase 2 and Phase 3.

Oral blending – hearing a series of sounds and merging them together to say the word, for example an adult says ‘b-u-s’ and the child says ‘bus’.

Blending – children see a word, say those individual sounds in the word and then merges those sounds together to hear the whole words like
c-a-t makes ‘cat’. This is vital for reading.

Segmenting – the opposite to blending. Children break up the word into its component sounds. This is vital for spelling and writing words.

Phoneme – The smallest unit of sound. There are approximately 44 in the English language to learn.

Grapheme – the written form of a phoneme. They can be made up of different numbers of letters for example 1 letter – s, 2 letters – ai, 3 letters – igh.

Digraph – two letters that make one phoneme, for example oo, oa, ee

Trigraph – three letters that make one phoneme, for example ear, igh, air

Split digraph – perhaps you know this as the’magic e’? It is when a digraph (ie) has been split and a consonant has been placed in the middle. The ‘ie’ is still making the sound despite a letter in the middle. There are five split digraphs to learn
i_e like in time
a_e like in cake
o_e like in joke
e_e like in theme
u_e like in tube

Decoding/decodable – being able to ‘sound out’ the word into its componant phonemes.

Polysyllabic – a word that is made up of more that one syllable.

Tricky words – there are words within each of the phonics phases that cannot be decoded and sounded out. These words just need to be learnt by sight. Sometimes a tricky word taught within a phase can become a decodable word once your child moves up the phases, for example ‘out’ and ‘like’

High Frequency words – these are words that occur most often in books and stories. They can be both decodable or tricky words.

Non-words/Alien Words – Words that can be decoded but are made up and do not make sense. These words really test phonics skills. If a child has good phonic knowledge they will be able to decode both real and alien words.

Sound buttons – a button drawn or placed under each individual grapheme. Every time the button is pressed your child makes the sound and then blends all the sounds together to read the words. The word ‘cat’ would have three dot sounds buttons and ‘moon’ would also have three but the ‘oo’ would have a longer line button underneath.

CVC – Consonant, vowel, consonant. These can be simple three letter words like ‘mat’ but also the word ‘rain’ is a CVC word as the ‘ai’ is a vowel digraph in the middle. This is the same for words like moon, chain, sheet. The ‘ch’ and ‘sh’ are a consonant digraph and one sound. The word ‘boy’, for example, even though has 3 letters is not a CVC word as it only has two phonemes b-oy. This is the same for words like cow, tie, say.

Alliteration – words that begin with the same phoneme (snake, sock, scissors, star)

Letter formation – the way each individual letter is formed. Children will need to learn where they need to start for each letter.

Recommended reading lists for Year 1

Best Books for Year 1 | Ages 5-6 Recommended Reads | BooksForTopics

https://schoolreadinglist.co.uk/reading-lists-for-ks1-school-pupils/suggested-reading-list-year-1-pupils-ks1-age-5-6/

Diary Dates 2024-25

October 17 Harvest Festival Service

October 25 Break Up for Half term

November 4 Inset

November 5 Pupils start Autumn Term 2

November 14 Remembrance Service

December 11 Nativity dress Rehearsal

December 12 Nativity 2pm and 5.30 

December 17 Christmas Party Key Stage 1

December 18 Christmas Jumper Day and Christmas Lunch ,Pupils break up for Christmas.

December 19-20th Inset

January 6 Spring Term 1 commences for pupils

January 17 Pantomime