Mrs Lock and Mrs Marshall - Class 1
Spring Term Overview
Spring Term 2024
Welcome to all of our new Year 1 family and our Year 1 class page. Your year 1 teacher's are Mrs Lock who will be teaching on Monday to Wednesday and Mrs Marshall who will teach Wednesday to Friday. Our teaching partner in year 1 is Mrs Chilton who the children already know well from Foundation.
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 the Spring term we have lots of lovely learning to engage with.
- 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 and each child will also be heard read in a smaller focused reading group.
- We will begin the term with a poetry unit where we will look at rhyme and using our adjectives to describe. This is linked with our science unit which focuses on 'The Senses'.
- Our second text will focus on Julia Donaldson's 'The Detective Dog' This text will allow us to explore the use of our senses.
- The first half term will end with some non fiction writing, focusing on all we have learned about the five senses.
Reading:
We would ask that all children read to an adult at home at least three times at week and to record this in their reading diaries. Once an adult at school has seen three signatures, the children will move along our reading reward board to reach the treasure chest, allowing them to choose a reward for their efforts. To maximise the benefits of reading at home we recommend that you ask your child to tell you about the book 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 be sending 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 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.
- Differentiated spellings linked to phonics will be sent home after the first term once we have assessed your child individually on their phonics knowledge. A reading for pleasure book and phonics phase book will be sent home with your child each week.
- In Maths we will be focusing on the key area of Place Value as our first unit for the Spring term looking at numbers within 20, followed by a unit to build on existing addition and subtraction skills. We will then return to place value moving on to numbers up to 50. In the second half term we will focus on measurement looking at length, height, mass and volume.
- In Science lessons we will be learning about: Senses and the human body.
- In Geography we will be exploring weather patterns looking at seasonal changes, and exploring countries in the UK.
- In History we will be exploring toys finding out what toys were like in the past.
- In Computing: Children will be focusing on text and images followed by comic and music creation. The importance of E safety will also be taught throughout year 1 through stories, songs and activities.
- In Art and Design Year 1 will create simple three dimensional shapes and structures using familiar materials, developing skills in manipulating paper and card. They fold, roll and scrunch materials to make their own sculptures.
- In Design and Technology: the children will be working on joining materials in a variety of ways as they design and make a hand mitt puppet to represent characters in a story.
- In Music the children will be exploring how sounds can be produced in different ways using voices and instruments. They will listen to a variety of music including Flight Of The Bumblebee and William Tell Overture, and will begin to recognize how composers use dynamics, tempo and timbre to bring a character or theme to life! They will learn to sing simple songs as a class, adding facial expressions and actions to enhance a performance. The children will explore song lyrics and use these as a basis for their own compositions. Working as a class and in small groups, they will compose short sound sequences to tell a story or reflect a character and perform these to each other. They will learn to follow musical instructions and invent their own musical notation to represent a sequence of sounds.
- In PE we will be learning the fundamental skills of throwing and catching as we complete a unit focused on ball skills. The children will also explore dance looking at shapes and developing sequencing skills.
- In RE: we will be learning about symbols in religious worship and practice as well as exploring celebrations and festivals. The children will explore how churches and synagogues are important to believers.
- In PSHE/RSE: Year 1 will be getting Heartsmart where they will learn how too much selfie isn't healthy; this unit focuses on friendships and teamwork. They will then move on to the unit 'Don't hold on to what is wrong' which explores forgiveness and ways to manage negative emotion. Y1 will also look at how our money helps others and what we use our money for.
Useful information:
- Our PE lessons are on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. We would ask that all pupils come to school in their P.E. kits on these days. 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.
Contact Mrs Marshall
Timetable
Spellings
Phonics Screening Information
24 Acts of Kindness for Lent
Go to the end of this powerpoint to find a game aimed at practising reading numbers written as words.
How to help your child to be ready for Year 1 and for help with blending sounds.
Year 1 100 High Frequency words
Help with phonemes...
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.
Reading in Foundation and Key Stage 1 Information for Parents/ Carers
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/
Parent/ Carer Reading Comprehension Questions
Please use the powerpoint slides below to help your child practise their phonemes. Start with Phase 2 and practise each phase until they are confident with all their grapheme/phoneme knowledge up to phase 5.
Non negotiables for core subjects Y1
Writing end of year expectations
Heart Smart
Playdough is brilliant for building muscle strength that is needed for pencil grip and letter formation. It is easy to make and can be used in many ways: try rolling it into lengths and use these to form letters or numbers. Or write words using sounds and use the playdough as 'sound buttons' to press as they say each sound.
Diary Dates 2023-24
September 4-5 Inset Day
September 6 First day back for pupils
October 30-Half term
December 15 Break up for Christmas
December 18-29 Christmas Holidays
January 2 Inset Day
January 3 Spring Term starts for all pupils
February 12-16 Half Term
March 28 Breakup for Easter
March 29-12 April Easter Holidays
May 27-31 Half Term
July 23 Pupils break up for Summer
July 24 Inset Day