Key Stage One

By Year 1, children move to a more traditional school day, with daily maths and English lessons alongside theme based learning which is both exciting and challenging.

We place a great deal of importance on early reading and embrace synthetic phonics as a key tool for helping children to make sense of the sounds and letters which make up our spoken and written language. The school uses letters and sounds to help teach phonics.

Letters and sounds

Homework

The children will bring home a book to share each evening. Year 2 children will bring home spellings to learn. All children will be set maths homework on my maths from time to time. They may also bring home other topic based activities that might require your help. Please support your child with these activities as they can be very helpful in encouraging your child to develop independent learning skills. In particular, supporting with reading on a daily basis has a very positive effect on overall learning.

Letter formations

Correct formation of letters is taught, progressing to joined up writing when appropriate. See below for the letter formations that we teach at Balliol.

To help your children to practice these, you could:

Ask them to write the letter shapes in wet sand

Paint the letter shapes using finger painting or cotton buds in paint

Write the letter shape in highlighter pen and ask them to trace over the top of it

Write the letter shape and ask them to copy it underneath

Spelling Support

Phonics:
- encourage your child to listen carefully to sounds in words
- encourage them to write the sounds that they hear in order to help them make phonetically plausible attempts to spell words.
Learning high frequency and key words – some words have to be learned from memory such as 'the'.
- encourage children to learn the spellings of these words from memory and practice writing them.

Here is a list of the high frequency and key words that we use at Balliol in Year 1:

Here is a list of the high frequency and key words that we use at Balliol in Year 2:

Magnetic letters See if your child can use these magnetic letters to spell out different words

Here are 15 ideas to get children writing at home:

Put them in charge of writing a shopping list and being the one to tick off items whilst in the shop
Write a postcard
Keep a diary of happy memories
Write some song lyrics (perhaps to a well-known tune)
Magic spells
Write your own recipe
Wish list of things that they would like to do when they are older
Film/TV review
Design a menu
Describe your favourite superhero or design your own one
Take some photos of a place that you visit together and use it as a story scene setting
Make a mind map
Listen to a piece of music and write how it makes you feel
Write a set of instructions on how to build a model
Make up your own script for a weather forecast or news report

Reading

At Balliol, we start by teaching letter sounds rather than letter names. We therefore have a phonic-based reading approach and encourage children to sound out unfamiliar words whilst using the pictures and book context to help them.

Once children are able to hear the sounds in words and blend sounds together, they are introduced to simple one sound, one spelling CVC words (consonant, vowel, consonant) such as 'mum', 'dog', 'jam' and 'sit'.

Next, we introduce the concept that the sounds '<f>', '<l>', '<s>' and '<z>' can be spelt with the two letter-spellings '<ff>', '<ll>', '<ss>' and '<zz>', such as in 'bell'. We call this 'two letters, one sound.'

As the children grow in confidence with this, we move onto VCC, CVCC, CCVC, CCVCC and CCCVC words, such as, for example, 'elf', 'hand', 'swim', 'trust' and 'scrub'.

After this, their understanding of the concept 'two letters, one sound' is further developed through the introduction of '<sh>', '<ch>' and '<th>', in words like 'shop', 'chimp' and 'thin'.

Finally, two, three and four letter spellings of the vowels are introduced and pupils are taught how to read and spell polysyllabic words, starting with simpler words (such as 'bedbug') and gradually moving to the more complex (such as 'mathematical').

The children will bring home a book to share each evening. Here are a few ideas to help them with their reading:

Encourage them to sound out unfamiliar words or use the pictures to help them
Ask them questions about what they have read
Get them to predict the ending of the story

Please write in their reading diary to share with us how they are getting on at home.

Useful reading website - Oxford Owl

Maths

A lot of maths opportunities come from real life experiences such as:

Cooking - measuring vocabulary when weighing ingredients, capacity of containers, time of cooking, fractions when dividing up food such as cake!
Going shopping - addition and subtraction when using money, coin recognition, estimating how much all of your item will cost
Painting a picture - size of paper, ratio of different colours when colour mixing
Making a necklace - repeating patterns, length vocabulary
Watching TV or making a phone call - number recognition when changing the channel/dialing the number