Life at school can be very busy and our timetable is subject to change, however we usually have a phonics sessions each morning, followed by maths and then a break.  Our English session is then followed by lunch.  Our afternoons vary across the week and include French, topic work, forest school, music, ICT, class and full school assemblies.

We visit the library on a Tuesday.  Please ensure your child brings their library book in as they are only permitted to have one library book at a time.

We have PE sessions on Mondays and Wednesdays but the children's kit should be in school for the entire week.  Unless it is incredibly dirty, the PE kit will be sent home each half term for washing. 

Show and Tell is on a Friday following the session with our Year 6 buddies (see below).

On a Friday afternoon, Year 1 and Year 6 children buddy up and work together. Over the weeks, the Year 6’s have enjoyed supporting their buddies with reading, maths, computer skills and writing lessons too. This weekly activity benefits both groups of children equally. It gives the older children a chance to ‘teach’ the year 1 children in a different way to Miss Vogel or Miss Gillick.  This not only helps with their confidence and patience, but also helps to consolidate their understanding in the subject they are helping with.

The Year 1 children love having their new friends coming to visit and enjoy the one-to-one contact with an older child. The buddies come for half an hour or so, but the friendships carry on out on the playground and around the school. 

Topic is the umbrella term for the other subjects taught in Year 1. We include science, history, geography, PSHE, RE and DT in our topic teaching. The topics might change from year to year, here are just some of the areas we will look at this year:

• Materials
• Weather
• Great Fire of London
• Parts of the body
• Animals and their habitats
• Castles
• Growing

The children's diaries are checked every morning by Mrs Siers and this is the place to pop messages about changes about home time pick-ups, clubs and of course reading comments.

The school expectation is that every child reads at least five times a week and that should be recorded in the book. Each session of reading at home should last no more than ten minutes or so with an opportunity for both you and your child to read. If the book is too tricky or too simple then please comment in the diary and we will sort this out. We will, of course, listen to the children read in school as well. There is a reading reward chart in the classroom and every Monday we will add up the amount of readings that have occurred from the previous week. The children have the opportunity to ‘jump up a leaf’ every time they complete five recorded readings. This in turn, is worth a stamp on their Hedgehog Reward cards.*

Across the whole of the infant school, we have the same reward chart. The children are moved up to the ‘rainbow’ for good behaviour, excellent contributions or effort. When undesirable behaviour is shown, the children are given a verbal warning. If it continues, then they are moved on the ‘cloud’. This in itself is a secondary warning system and has no consequence as such. Should the behaviour continue further then the child is moved on to the ‘raincloud’ which results in 5 minutes of Gold Time on Fridays being lost. At any point, the children can redeem themselves and move back up the chart.

At the end of the day, those who have made it to the rainbow get a stamp on their *Hedgehog Reward card. Ten of these stamps result in a merit award.

Stamps on this card can be earnt from:

• Five reads per week
• Reaching the rainbow
• Spellings

In Year 1 spellings are still centred around the sounds.  The link below will give you an overview of the sounds they are concentrating on and a list of examples used. This document covers guidance and spelling lists for all KS1 and KS2 children.

Your child will be given ten spellings each Monday and will be tested on a Friday. The reason for this is due to us starting a new story book each week and the words relate to those in that particular book. From Monday to Friday your child will read, spell, write and practise these words in class with their phonics teacher. No explicit teaching needs to be done at home, we only ask you to revise and review the words with your child.  

Each set of spellings will contain Red words which are not phonetically decodable and Green words which can be sounded out using their phonic knowledge. The small purple books, with words for the week, will come home every Monday and need to be returned every Friday. During the week, please revise these words with your child orally, (using sounds for the green words and letter names for the red words) or in written form. This can be done in the purple books or on any scrap paper. Alternatively, you could write in sand, use magnetic letters, felt tip writing or any other creative method that suits your child.

Please spend 5-10 minutes reviewing these words as often as you are able to during the course of the week.

Year 1 is a big transition from Reception. The children often find the structure very reassuring and enjoy the routines that we follow. Top tips would be to help your child with little independent skills, like:

• Being able to zip up their own coat
• Being able to change in and out of their school uniform independently in less than ten minutes
• Helping to pack their school/PE bag at home so they know what goes inside it
• Knowing to change their own reading book when they have finished it
• Have a look at the lunches for the day ahead so they know which option to choose in the morning
• Reading five times a week!

WAGOLL means What A Good One Looks Like!

When the children are learning something new, or refreshing their learning it is important that we show them a working example.  By using a WAGOLL we can demonstratethe steps towards a successful outcome and a model for them to aspire to.  Below are some examples.