St Gregory & St Patrick's Catholic Infant School
Year 1:
In year 1, here are some things your child will be learning:
Maths:
Number and place value
- Counting up to 100 forwards and backwards
- Reading and writing numbers up to 100
- Reading and writing numbers up to 20 in words
- Counting on and back in twos, fives and tens
- Using a number line to put numbers in the correct order
- Recognising patterns in numbers
- Recognising odd and even numbers
- Estimating amounts of objects and then counting to check
Calculating
- Learning simple addition and subtraction
- Recognising mathematical words and symbols
- Recognising different coins and notes
- Learning which pairs of numbers add up to 20 (number bonds)
- Doubling and halving
- Finding a half and quarter of a quantity
- Working out multiplication and division questions using objects to group or share out
Measuring
- Telling the time to the hour and half hour
- Putting the days of the week and months of the year in order
- Measuring length, weight and capacity and comparing these measurements
Geometry
- Recognising, naming and describing common 2D and 3D shapes
- Using shapes to make patterns, models and pictures
- Describing whole, half, quarter and three-quarter turns
Games to play at home:
https://www.topmarks.co.uk/maths-games/5-7-years/counting
https://www.oxfordowl.co.uk/for-home/kids-activities/fun-maths-games-and-activities/
http://www.ictgames.com/mobilePage/
https://www.topmarks.co.uk/maths-games/hit-the-button
https://www.bing.com/profile/history?FORM=EDGEHS
https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/subjects/zjxhfg8
English: Handwriting
In year 1, here are some things your child will be learning:
- Sit correctly at a table, holding a pencil comfortably and correctly.
- Begin to form lower case letters in the correct direction, starting and finishing in the right place
- Form capital letters and the digits 0-9
- Understand which letters belong to which handwriting ‘families’ (i.e. letters that are formed in similar ways) and to practise these
We have been practising hard all year to improve the presentation of our handwriting. After all our hard work, we are very excited to be moving on to practising cursive handwriting. Cursive handwriting is a style of writing that gets the children ready to join up.
Practising makes perfect so here are some top tips to use at home:
- Sit up straight and place your feet flat on the floor
- Hold your pencil correctly
- Start on the line
- Don't take your pencil off the page until you have finished that particular letter.
Things to try at home:
Have fun trying practising your letters using the Sky Writer game:
https://www.ictgames.com/mobilePage/skyWriter/index.html
English: Phonics
In year 1, here are some things your child will be learning:
Reading:
- Match all 40+ graphemes to their phonemes
- Blend sounds in unfamiliar words
- Divide words into syllables, for example, pocket, rabbit, carrot, thunder, sunset
- Read compound words, for example, football, playground, farmyard, bedroom
- Read words with contractions, e.g. I’m, I’ll, we’ll, and understand that the apostrophe represents the omitted letter(s)
- Read phonically decodable texts with confidence
- Read words containing ‘s, es, ing, ed, er , est’ endings
- Read words which have the prefix –un added
- Read words of more than one syllable that contain taught GPCs (grapheme, phoneme correspondence)
Writing:
-
- Identify known phonemes in unfamiliar words
- Use syllables to divide words when spelling
- Use knowledge of alternative phonemes to narrow down possibilities for accurate spelling
- Use the spelling rule for adding s or es for verbs in 3rd person singular
- Name the letters of the alphabet in order
- Use letter names to show alternative spellings of the same phoneme
- Know how the prefix ‘un’ can be added to words to change meaning
- Add the endings –ing, –ed and –er to verbs where no change is needed to the root word
In Year 1 the children have phonics everyday for 20 minutes. Phonics is a strategy used to help children read and is made up of 5 different phases. Phases 1, 2, 3 and 4 are taught in nursery and reception. Phase 5 generally takes children the whole of Year 1. Here, we start introducing alternative spellings for sounds, like 'igh'. Children master these in reading first, and as their fluency develops, we begin to see them using them correctly in spelling.’
Children learn new graphemes (different ways of spelling each sound) and alternative pronunciations for these: for example, learning that the grapheme ‘ow’ makes a different sound in ‘snow’ and ‘cow’.
They should become quicker at blending, and start to do it silently.
They learn about split digraphs (the ‘magic e’) such as the a-e in ‘name.’
They’ll start to choose the right graphemes when spelling, and will learn more tricky words, including ‘people,’ ‘water’ and ‘friend’. They also learn one new phoneme: /zh/, as in ‘treasure.’
By the end of Year 1, children should be able to:
- Say the sound for any grapheme they are shown
- Write the common graphemes for any given sound (e.g. ‘e,’ ‘ee,’ ‘ie,’ ‘ea’)
- Use their phonics knowledge to read and spell unfamiliar words of up to three syllables
- Read all of the 100 high frequency words, and be able to spell most of them
- Form letters correctly
At the end of Year 1, all children are given a Phonics Screening Check to ensure they have mastered the appropriate knowledge.
Games to play at home:
https://www.phonicsbloom.com/uk/game/list/phonics-games-phase-5
http://www.letters-and-sounds.com/phase-3-games.html
https://www.topmarks.co.uk/english-games/5-7-years/letters-and-sounds
https://www.topmarks.co.uk/english-games/5-7-years/words-and-spelling
https://www.topmarks.co.uk/Search.aspx?q=spelling%20activities%20KS1
https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/topics/zcgv39q
https://www.ictgames.com/mobilePage/literacy.html
Year 2:
In year 2, here are some things your child will be learning:
Maths:
Number and place value