Learning in Year 1
Immersive Learning
At our school, we learn many subjects under one umbrella; we call this ‘Immersive Learning’ as the children are fully immersed in a particular topic or theme for a term and become experts in that area of the curriculum. Each term we will add the medium term overview for the new topic which can be found below. These topics will form the majority of our lessons, combining literacy, science, art, DT, history and geography. It really helps your child build their knowledge and understanding if you can support their learning at home by, for example, taking them to a museum or finding a non-fiction book in the library linked to each term’s topic.
Physical Education
Please come into school dressed in your PE kit on the day you have PE and wear trainers on your
running days.
Phonics
We teach the children to read with Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised. This is our systematic synthetic phonics (SSP) programme to teach early reading and spelling.
We will work through the entire Little Wandle Programme until your child can successfully utilise their phonic knowledge and blending skills to read fluently. Children need to learn to read as quickly as reasonably possible, so they can move from learning to read, to reading to learn, giving them access to the treasure house of reading.
In Reception the children have daily phonics lessons. They will be taught 4 new grapheme phoneme correspondences (GPCs) per week, plus a review lesson on a Friday. Knowing a GPC means being able to match a phoneme (sound) to a grapheme (written representation) and vice versa. The children will also learn a series of ‘tricky words’. Tricky words are those words which cannot be sounded out using their phonemes. We will build into the timetable some weeks for the children to consolidate what has been taught so far. We assess your child every six weeks to check progress. Any child who needs extra support will have keep-up sessions planned for them.
For further information on how to support your child with phonics, please visit the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds website:
https://www.littlewandlelettersandsounds.org.uk/resources/for-parents/
You will find attached a presentation from our parents’ phonics workshop.
Reading
As the Reception children’s phonics skills progress, they will also take part in Reading Practice Sessions in small groups. The children will begin to bring books home to practise with you at home. Although your child will be taught to read at school, you can have a huge impact on their reading journey by continuing their practice at home. Please use the Reading Record to let us know how they are getting on.
There will be three types of reading book that your child will bring home each week:
- A reading practice book. This book has been carefully matched to your child’s phonics knowledge.
- An online reading practice book. This book will be an electronic copy of the same book shared in the classroom sessions.
- A sharing book. The sharing book is a book they have chosen for you to enjoy together. Please remember that you shouldn’t expect your child to read this alone. Read it to or with them. Discuss the pictures, enjoy the story, predict what might happen next, use different voices for the characters, explore the facts in a nonfiction book. The main thing is that you have fun!
The more you read, the better you’ll get! Also, please remember to ask your parents or carers to sign your reading record so that your teacher can see what you’ve been read and how often.
Spellings
Please support your child in learning the following spellings: