Mrs Greaney works Tuesday - Friday               Mrs King works Monday

Teaching assistants
Mrs Thatcher works in the class all week

Reading

Children will be given a decodable book to read within school and at home. These books have been organised into phonic phases under our new scheme ‘Unlocking Letters and Sounds’. The children will also be given a library book to promote reading for pleasure. The teaching staff will change your child’s books when they have been read at least 3 times. Please share these books with your child as often as you can and record this in the reading record book. We have a reading lesson four times a week when the children will be doing class and group reading activities.  Any time you spend sharing books has a big impact on your child’s progress. We also run two reading incentive schemes – one where the children get a raffle ticket if they read 5 times a week and this is recorded by you in their reading record books.  When the raffle in drawn the children win a prize.  We also encourage the children to read the books on our 50 books to read list which also earns small prizes.  Please hand this in regularly so we can keep up to date with how many the children have read. To find out more about this, please look on our website under English. 

Phonics

In preparation for the statutory Phonics Screening which takes place in June, your child will be expected to confidently recognise the 40+ graphemes (written sounds). They will be continuing to learn how to use these graphemes to blend (for reading) and segment (for spelling). We will be using our new phonic scheme Unlocking Letters and Sounds to teach phonics and reading. Please spend some time practising the sounds on the phase card and words to read on the word card when we have taught each phase. We will be holding a Phonics workshop this term explaining what phonics is and how we teach your children to read. 

Handwriting
During Year 1 the children will begin to learn how to join letters in a cursive style. We want them to become familiar with how the style looks and begin to use it when they have learnt the correct formation and when they feel ready to do so.  They can still print their words when writing their spellings.  A sheet will be put into the reading folder with the correct formation for each letter.

Spellings
The children will have a spelling book in their book bags with words to learn each week.  There is guidance in the front of the book.  We will be collecting these in on a Thursday and they will be given out with new words to learn for the next week on a Friday.

Maths
Please continue to encourage your child to practise counting and writing their numbers 0-100.  Children are assessed termly in maths using a mixture of formal and informal ‘quizzes’.  Each term the children work on Key Instant Recall Facts (KIRFS). These are things we expect the children to learn and more information in on our website.

PE & Wellies

We will be having PE on Tuesday morning and Thursday afternoons. Please make sure all items of clothing are clearly labelled with your child's name and include items that are suitable for outdoor PE during the colder weather. The children will wear their PE kits to school on Tuesdays and these need to be returned to school on Wednesday

Please send in a pair of named wellies. These are kept on our welly rack outside the classroom.

Water bottles

Please ensure your child has a named water bottle in school everyday. Our school policy is that these are filled with water and sent home every day to be cleaned and refilled.

Rewards

Our class has a Gem Jar. When children have shown kindness and have made a good effort in their learning gems will be added to the jar. When the jar is full, we have a treat as a class.