Spring Term

Here are some of the things we will be learning in Spring Term during our 'Around the World' topic. 

Welcome

Welcome back to all our wonderful Year 1 children and their families. We hope you all had a lovely Summer holidays and enjoyed some family time. It has been a good start to the 2021/22 academic year.  The children have settled well and have enjoyed getting to know each other in our Year 1 classes.  We are all enjoying our new topic 'Enchanted Forest'. 

How can I support my child at home?

• It is extremely important that your child uses a comfortable and efficient pencil grip, even though this may not be the same as your own. This should be the pincer grip. See picture above.
• Help your child to practise dressing and undressing including being able to turn clothes the right way out.
• Help your child to practise putting on his/her coat and doing/undoing the fastenings, including zips.
• Practise cutting up food so they can use a knife and fork in the dinner hall.
• Develop independence and thinking skills by encouraging your child to think for themselves and solve simple problems with minimal prompting
• Play games which might involve turn taking, rolling dice or moving counters
• Share stories together, discussing the pictures, plot and characters
• Listen to your child read their school reading books daily.
• Read and spell words from the Year R and Year 1 key word list
• Practise writing your child's full name with correct letter formation and a capital letter to start.
• Practise individual letters, starting in the correct place
• Read, write and order numbers from 0-50 and 0-100
• Practise mental maths toolkits, little and often, to embed skills.
• Finding pairs of numbers that make 10 as well as other numbers e.g. 5 = 0+5, 1+4, 2+3, 3+2, 4+1, 5+0

Key information

Key words

In Year 1 it is expected that children will read key words on sight, or be able to fluently apply their phonics to read them.  Throughout the year children will also be learning to spell these words.  Some of these words are 'tricky words' that cannot be sounded out (e.g. said) and some of these words require the children to apply their phonics knowledge (e.g. sound). Please click here to see the words the children will be covering in Year 1, through their phonics lessons, spelling time and the English curriculum.  It would be really helpful to practise a few words at a time at home too.

Reading

Your child will bring home a scheme book appropriate for their reading level in their book bag each day.  Once the book has been read either at home or school, and this has been recorded in the red reading log, your child will be able to change their book to get the next one in that particular scheme.  For more information about reading, please refer to the home-school partnership document at the bottom of this page.  Thank you for your continued support in reading regularly with your child at home. 

Phonics

When supporting your child with their reading, you may find it useful to refer to these sounds.  As well as the individual alphabet sounds (e.g. the 'd' sound in 'dog'), your child will also learn these digraphs (sounds with two letters) and trigraphs (sounds with three letters).

Letter formation

Your child will continue to practise the cursive letter formation that they learnt in Year R.  In Year 1, once the children are confident with forming letters correctly and with the correct orientation, they may begin to look at joining.  Please see below for guidance on letter formation.

Useful Websites