Hello and Welcome to Year 1!

Our Newsletters

Our Curriculum Newsletters provide parents with an overview of the half terms teaching and learning in year 1.

Autumn 1 - Guy Fawkes

Autumn 2- Remembrance Day & Mexico

Spring 1 - Childhood

Spring 2 - Bright Lights, Big City

Summer 1 - School Days

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 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 take photographs using the iPad. Please view our long term plan for this year.

Take a Look Inside our Classrooms...

English

Reading

In Year One, reading is primarily taught through daily phonics teaching. We follow the Read, Write, Inc 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.

As Year One progresses and the children grow in confidence with sound recognition, we also teach comprehension lessons based on our year group novel. These lessons focus on the skills of vocabulary, inference, prediction, explanation, retrieval and sequencing.

In addition, 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 have a ‘Fab Five’. This contains our very favourite five books, which we can read and re-read in order to develop story language, vocabulary and comprehension.

Writing

In Year One the children write for lots of different purposes linked to our year group or whole school topic. 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. As the children grow in confidence with letter formation, they start to learn cursive joined handwriting. 

In addition to writing, we also teach weekly grammar lessons, where we focus on punctuation, adjectives, nouns, conjunctions, prefixes and suffixes and many more concepts.

Year One Phonics Screening Check

The Year One Phonics Screening Check is a short, light-touch national statutory assessment to confirm whether individual pupils have learnt phonic decoding to an appropriate standard. It will identify the children who need extra help so that they can receive support to improve their reading skills. They will then be able to retake the check so that schools can track pupils until they are able to decode. The screening check includes some 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 an oral/mental starter and recall of our KIRF- please see 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 same 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 Year One the times tables we focus on are 2s, 5s and 10s. We count to and back from 100 and start at different numbers every day. 

Topic

We teach one topic every term. Some of these are whole school and some year group specific.

• 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
• Our topics this year are: The Magical Mysteries of Knaresborough, Remembrance Day & Christmas, Childhood, Bright Lights Big City and School Days

Tapestry

In Year One, we continue to use Tapestry to share your child's learning journey. During provision times, the children take photos of their challenge based learning, which is then posted for parents to see and comment. We also 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. In the Spring term, we will start to send maths homework and spellings. 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 practise accurately reading and writing the red words with your child.