Year 1

Spring Term

We hope that you had a lovely Christmas break. Welcome to the spring term where we look forward to the continuing partnerships between home and school.

Reading

Our goal is to create confident, fluent, independent readers. We prioritise reading at Latchmere School and have very carefully chosen the texts your child will study this term. We focus on word reading to develop fluency and encourage the whole class to join in through strategies such as choral reading (the whole class read together) and echo reading (the teacher models the reading and the class echo back). We also have the Latchmere Reading skills. These are based on comprehension skills such as retrieval, inference, summarising, making links, prediction and vocabulary.

In Year 1, our main topic for this half term is ‘Once Upon a Time’. We have lots of exciting lessons and activities planned and look forward to sharing our learning with you. We will be studying Fairy-tales including:

We will be continuing to embed the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds phonics programme. This involves daily teaching of phonics and three reading sessions per week for every child focussing on decoding, prosody and comprehension.

Please see the phonics page on the website for further information.

Maths

Our curriculum is based on the White Rose Maths programme. This research-based initiative ensures that the skills and concepts children taught are fully embedded before moving on. The children are taught strategies such as bar modelling and have plenty of opportunities to use ‘manipulatives’ such as counters and dienes all the way through the school.

This term we will be focusing on Addition and Subtraction within 20, and Place Value within 50.

Children in Year 1 also use the Numbots program to help embed the core maths skills of subitising, number bonds, addition and subtraction.

Curriculum Highlights

This term, we will be learning about Judaism in RE. We will be developing Ball skills and introducing Yoga in PE, to continue the focus on developing key skills in this subject. In Science, we will be classifying animals by what they eat; carnivores, omnivores and herbivores. Queens are the topic for history, focusing on the lives of 3 famous queens; Elizabeth I, Victoria and Elizabeth II. During February, we have a Kings and Queens day where the children dress up as kings, queens, princesses, princes, knights, dragons etc. This is on Thursday 2 February 2023.

You can find out more information about the spring term learning by looking at the overviews and programmes of study on the website.

Updates and Reminders

Beginning and End of Day Arrangements

All children should arrive in school between 8.45am-9am ready for the start of the school day and be picked up at 3.20pm. Please remember to speak to the class teacher or use the message book on the class notice board to record when alternative arrangements have been made for your child at the end of day.

Buddies

All the children in Year 1 have been paired with a ‘buddy’ in Year 4. We enjoyed creating Christmas cards and swapping them with our buddies last term. We hope at some point to have opportunities to meet with our buddy class for paired reading and other shared learning activities, however until we can we will continue to make cards and letters for them to support and encourage writing and reading.

School Uniform and snack pots

Please ensure that everything that your child brings to school is labelled including: your child’s school uniform, P.E kit, water bottle, snack pots, hats, gloves, scarves and coats.

Homework grid

We will home a grid with optional homework for your child to complete at home to support their learning.