Phonics is a huge part of Year 1. Your child will continue to expand on their knowledge of phonics and will probably surprise you with just how quickly they develop their reading during the course of this year. We will do 30 minutes of phonics learning each day, building on what the children did in Reception. These are fun, pacy sessions which the children enjoy. They will learn new phonemes, tricky words, spelling rules and how to sound out and blend to aid them with their reading and writing.
The children will be encouraged to ‘have a go’ at spelling when writing independently, by phonetically sounding out words. We may well ask them to ‘write it like it sounds’ and, as the weeks go by, they will learn the correct sounds as their grapheme knowledge grows.
Your child will be learning through topics this year, following our Cornerstones curriculum. We will learn English through all sorts of wonderful stories related to these topics.
We will learn to write in sentences and to use exciting language, using Think it, Say it, to orally rehearse our sentences and Write it, Check it to ensure our sentences make sense.
We follow the White Rose maths scheme to support our teaching and learning in maths, which has number at its heart. Maths lessons this year tend to have plenty of hands-on activities, allowing children to build competency, moving from concrete to abstract through the following approach:
Concrete – children have the opportunity to use concrete objects and manipulatives to help them understand what they are doing.
Pictorial – alongside this, children use pictorial representations. These representations can then be used to help reason and solve problems.
Abstract – both concrete and pictorial representations support children’s understanding of abstract methods.