Year 1

Christmas Songs to Practice

In Year 1 we have a broad and balanced curriculum, which is covered over a range of interesting and exciting subjects. Children are engaged and keen to learn because the teaching and learning is exciting and closely linked to the children’s personal interests.

We have 6 terms over the year and children engage in a range of enhancing experiences, which are tailored to the content of our learning. As part of this, we plan to have three school trips over the year to support the learning we do in school. These trips are a valuable part of the children’s learning and really help to bring it to life.

In Year 1, the children begin to be independent and autonomous learners who can think of ways to support their learning. They develop learning skills such as how to be resilient, critical and creative thinkers, reflective learners, problem solvers and team workers.

The curriculum in Key Stage one (infants) covers:

Maths, English, Science, Computing, Design Technology, History, Geography, Art, Music, R.E, P.E. and PSHCE.

RWI Reading Books

At school, your child will read individually with adults in the classroom, and they will bring a RWI book home to read with an adult. Children will change their reading book around once a week, as reading their book several times helps the children to become more fluent readers. After reading at home please write a comment in their reading diary, and we will do the same in school.

Books to Share

In our classroom, we have a range of books for your child to bring home and read with an adult for pleasure. These are lovely, specially chosen books that I hope your child will enjoy sharing with you at home.

Phonics

Phonics is taught daily as part of RWI and will help your child read and spell with the sounds used within words. In Year 1 we focus on reading and writing the sounds in words to help with spelling.

As you may know we have a phonics screening test in June so we prepare the children as best we can by teaching what we call ‘real and alien’ words as a way of identifying whether they can read any word by using the sounds they have learned.

This example shows real and alien words using the sounds ‘ai’ and ‘a-e’:

Real – rain, pain, main

Alien – maip, pait, laig

Real – plane, same, bake, take

Alien – rafe, nake, sate

Handwriting

We have adopted the Martin Harvey scheme for handwriting this year and are confident that we will see the children’s handwriting become even more fantastic through this scheme.

The most important thing at this stage is that your child is forming their letters the correct way round as this will help them when they are ready to join letters together in later years. We do handwriting practise regularly and hopefully this will help them to get a good grasp early on this year.

Daily Essentials

• A labelled water bottle.
• Book bag (not a backpack).
• Reading wallet with diary and reading book.
• A coat (we will be outside in all but the worst weather).

PE days

Monday and Wednesday (1L) or Wednesday and Thursday (1/2D) are our PE days this year, however, please send your child’s kit on a Monday so that they have it all week in case of any unexpected changes. Please see our school uniform policy for acceptable PE kit and include outdoor sports shoes, such as pumps.