Welcome to Year 1!
We are looking forward to an exciting year with the children and we hope they are ready to come back to school!
If you have any questions or concerns this week, please do come and speak to us. We look forward to seeing you all.
Yearly Overview
Please see below the yearly overview for our topics for Year 1 in each half term.
Key information for the Year 2024/25
Teacher
Mrs Price - Monday to Wednesday
Mrs Porter - Thursday and Friday
If you need to email us please do so via admin@woodhamley.essex.sch.uk
KS1 Teaching Assistants
Mrs Bremner
Mrs Halfyard
Mrs Kelsey
PE Days are Tuesday and Thursday.
Children should come to school dressed in their PE kits on these days.
Topics:
All About Me and My Local Area
Toys
Hospitals and Nursing
Australia
Famous Explorers
The Seaside
Phonics and Reading
Our aim at Woodham Ley Primary School is to develop confident, fluent, and enthusiastic readers. Through our commitment to the teaching of phonics and early reading skills, we aim for all of our children to become fluent readers by the end of Year One.
We teach early reading and phonics skills in Year One through Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised, a highly structured systematic synthetic phonics (SSP) programme.
Each week, children take part in daily phonics sessions, learning four new/alternative graphemes, as well as a weekly review session. At the start of the Autumn term, we revisit Phase 3 phonemes taught in Reception. By the end of the first half term, children are beginning to learn Phase 5 phonemes and reading words/sentences containing these graphemes. We continue to build on Phase 5 phonics knowledge until the Summer term by ‘growing the code’ (teaching alternative graphemes that have the same phoneme). See below.
Alongside the daily teaching of phonics, all children are assigned a stage appropriate and fully decodable reading book: Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised Big Cat books. These books are carefully matched, by class teachers, to prior phonic knowledge and skills, so that children can read fluently and independently. Ongoing assessment ensures that children will be able to read 90% of assigned texts (9 out of 10 words) correctly, using their prior phonic knowledge enabling each child to see themselves as a successful reader, developing further confidence in their reading ability. Each child reads the same book three times in school. Each read begins with a revisit and revise of previously taught Grapheme Phoneme Correspondences (GPCs) and words, including new vocabulary and tricky words appearing in the text, followed by sessions practicing decoding skills, prosody (intonation and expression) and comprehension skills. The child will then take this book home to read confidently and fluently to an adult.
In Year One, children are prepared for the Phonics Screening Check which is administered in the Summer term. Its sole purpose is to determine whether a child can phonically decode single words to an annually predetermined national standard.
In Writing, children are taught to apply taught phonic skills to write sentences, as well as use a large selection of high frequency words and adventurous topic based vocabulary. Children are encouraged to ‘have a go’ at spelling when writing independently, by segmenting (sounding out words phonetically) if they have not yet learned the correct spelling for a chosen word. Teachers will ask the children to use their ‘segmenting fingers’ and may ask the children to ‘write it like it sounds’ and, as they grow their phonics code, they will learn the correct graphemes to replace those guesses. During the teaching of writing the children will be encouraged to use capital letters, full stops, adjectives, and conjunctions whilst writing for a range of genres.
The videos below demonstrate how we teach phonics:
Sounds your child should already know:
Phase 2 Sounds
Phase 2 Sounds Part 2
Phase 3 Sounds
Maths Support
Here you can download free maths workbooks as an additional tool to support your child's learning at home! Simply print the workbook to match the term we are currently working on.
https://whiterosemaths.com/parent-resources#download
if you are looking to purchase additional maths workbooks to support the white rose curriculum they are learning in school, the 'Power Maths' (published by Pearson) workbooks are excellent.
Download the 1 minute maths app from White Rose -
The 1-minute maths app helps children build greater number confidence and fluency. It’s all about targeted practice in engaging, one-minute chunks! You can even download a free wall chart to record your child's scores.
Home Learning - For each lesson we teach using White Rose maths in Year 1, there is a matching home learning video. At any stage, your child can watch these at home to embed their learning.
What can you do to help at home?
A common question is how can parents help to support their child's learning?
- Read TO your child! The gateway to children's success is READING. Being a fluent, confident reader plays a key role in a child's learning. Although children learn to read in school through phonics and active read, do not underestimate the importance of a parent's role in developing a positive attitude to reading. First we must assist a child's love for reading by reading TO them every day. The best way of doing this is reading a story to them before bedtime each night. Switch off the technology and make it a special time that you look forward to each night.
- Listen to your child read every day. Encourage them to use their phonics to sound out each word then blend it together. Remember, it is not about quantity of pages read, it is about quality. Ask your child to read the same page more than once to develop confidence and fluency, point to random words on the page to see if they can read it out of context, go back and ask them to read words they struggled with to see if they now remember them, and of course, ask them questions about what they are reading to check they are understanding each sentence. These can be retrieval questions, such as 'what colour was the car?' or 'where was the cat?' or inference questions such as 'how do you think this character is feeling? or 'can you predict what might happen next?'. Even if you read only one page but over and over again, this is excellent reading practice. Remember to write in your child's reading record book to show us what reading they have been doing at home.
- Complete the weekend diary each week. Remember to let them be independent with this writing using their own phonics rather than telling your child how a word is spelt.
- practise 2, 5 and 10 times tables
- Try to incorporate maths into your daily home lives, discuss the time you are doing things and ask your child to look at the clock and tell you the time (o'clock then half past);when using coins and notes, ask your child to help you select the correct coins to help them to recognise their value; when cooking or baking, ask your child to help you weigh and measure out ingredients, and when cutting or sharing food, discuss the fractions you are using, for example, ask your child to cut their sandwich in half or quarters, when they are eating it, ask them how many quarters they have eaten and how many quarters they have left. When cutting a pizza, discuss how many pieces there are and what fraction this is.
