Hello and Welcome to Year One!

Our Newsletters

Our Curriculum Newsletters provide parents with an overview of the teaching and learning in Year One.

Autumn 1 - Let's travel back in time

Autumn 2 - Where do I live in the world?

In Year One teaching and learning is accessed through a balance of focused teaching and group work, and play-based opportunities. The classrooms are organised with a wide range provision areas, which children can access throughout the day. We encourage challenge-based learning during provision time, where children are encouraged to complete planned challenges and complete their 'provision challenge passport'. Please view our long term plan for this year.

Take a look inside our classrooms...

Reading

In Year One, reading is primarily taught through daily phonics teaching. We follow the Read, Write, Inc (RWI) scheme, which encourages children to learn sounds through catchy phrases and how to blend these sounds into real and nonsense words using the famous character Fred the frog. In every lesson, children have the opportunity to write words that contain the sound they are learning as well as words containing previously taught sounds.

Children are also introduced to a story, which is pitched at their phonic level. They read the story a minimum of three times with a focus on accuracy, fluency and comprehension. It is in our reading lessons that the children are introduced to ‘red words’. These words are tricky for the children as they are unable to segment and blend the words but instead must learn to read them by sight.

In addition to our daily RWI reading lessons, we also have daily Fab Five oracy lessons. We choose our favourite five books each half term and study one book a week. We read and re-read these books in order to develop story language and expression. These books are high-quality and contain at least two tier two vocabulary words per sentence. Each day we focus on a different reading domain (VIPERS - vocabulary, inference, prediction, explanation, retrieval and sequencing).

As the children progress in Year One, we teach written comprehension through a series of passages and through our class novel. We focus on the reading domains as listed above.

We also have daily story time where the children can vote for their favourite book to be read. We have reading areas in every classroom for the children to access during provision time and we also a word and poem of the week.

Writing

In Year One the children write for lots of different purposes. We write stories, non-fiction pieces, poems, instructions, recounts, captions and lots more! The writing activities have a mission statement, which allows the children to put their writing into a context and ensures it is meaningful. An important skill in Year One is to be able to hold a sentence and then write that sentence from memory, paying close attention to ‘red word’ spelling, handwriting, punctuation, finger spaces and phonics. 

In addition to writing, we also have grammar lessons where we focus on full stops, exclamation marks, question marks, adjectives, nouns, verbs, conjunctions, prefixes and suffixes and many more.

Year One Phonics Screening Check

The Year One Phonics Screening Check is a short, light-touch national statutory assessment to confirm whether children have learnt phonic decoding to an appropriate standard. For those few that do not reach the pass mark, they will resit the assessment in Year Two. The screening check includes alien/nonsense words (words that are not real). During daily phonics sessions children will have plenty of opportunities to apply their sound recognition skills on reading ‘nonsense words’.

Maths

Maths is taught daily following the WhiteRose scheme, which builds on prior knowledge and skills. Maths lessons and activities are very practical and hands on and begin with a recap and recall of our half termly KIRF (please see the maths page for more information). Lessons follow the sequential steps to develop fluency, reasoning and problem solving with the main mastery concepts of concrete, pictorial and abstract embedded within. After the formal teaching session, children complete an activity linked to the learning objective. They have the opportunity to choose a one, two or three star challenge, depending on their confidence level. One star challenge is expected level and two and three star are more challenging. The classrooms are equipped with high-quality practical resources which can be used during formal teaching and provision time. In the Spring/Summer term, we focus on the 2s, 5s and 10s times tables.

Every morning we count 0 to 100 , starting and finishing in random places as well as find one more and one less. 

Units of Work

• We use Purple Mash for computing which can be accessed at home for all subjects
• We use Charanga to teach music this can be accessed at home
• We use Jigsaw to teach PSHE
• We use Beyond the Physical to teach PE 
• Our units of work in history are: let's travel back in time, school days and let's fly 
• Our units of work in geography are: home sweet home, bright lights big city and oh i do like to be beside the seaside

Tapestry

In Year One, we continue to use Tapestry to share your child's learning journey. Once we know our poem of the week off by heart, we film it and post it on Tapestry for parents. We love to see the children's experiences out of school and therefore parents can also upload pictures and videos. Tapestry is used to share important messages with parents and for parents to communicate with their class teacher.

Our Timetable 

Homework

Every week your child will get 'talking homework’, which we will set on Tapestry. We also send maths, phonics and spellings homework. Homework will be set on a Friday to be brought back into school the following Thursday. Daily reading of reading books is also part of our homework. Please write a comment in their reading records. Please practice reading and writing the red words with your child as well as counting forwards and backwards 0-100 starting and finishing in random places.