Knowledge organisers are a summary of the key facts and essential 'sticky' knowledge that pupils need about a unit of work or a curriculum subject. They are a valuable tool for teachers, pupils and parents.

Parents as Partners 
We acknowledge that parents are the child‘s first educators and aim to provide opportunities to enable parents to feel involved with their child‘s learning. These opportunities include Pre-school visits, formal parents‘ evenings, ―Stay and Play sessions, ―Stay and Share sessions and ―Stay and Learn sessions and invitations to concerts and other special events. Parents receive a termly curriculum newsletter which informs them of work and activities being covered in classes each term. You will be informed of your child‘s progress at regular intervals throughout the year.  An initial parents evening in October is followed by one in January and a further opportunity in July when you will receive your child‘s full report.  Through our programme of Assertive Mentoring— Going for Green in key stage one, you also will receive pupil progress reports in October and January.
 
If you need to talk to the teacher, it will be most helpful if you could avoid detailed discussions at 8.45am when teachers are very busy with the children and the start of the day.  If you wish to see a member of staff after school, please make an appointment for a mutually convenient time.  In the infants we have members of staff at the school doors to take any messages you may have for the class teacher.

Phonics

In Reception we use the Jolly Phonics scheme to teach children their initial phonic sounds.

Please use the website below as an online guide to phonics. We hope it will become a really useful way to find out more about phonics, how it is taught in classrooms and how you can help your child at home.

www.readwithfonics.com/parents-phonics-guide

Letter Formation and Handwriting

You can support your child with their letter formation and handwriting by logging into LetterJoin on your tablet/phone or iPad. Please look on Class Dojo for your log in details.

                                                               Read to Succeed!

‘Read to Succeed’ is a school initiative aimed at improving the literacy skills of all our children. The key to achieving this is helping children to develop a passion for reading. We want every child to read at least 5 times a week.

Research suggests that ‘Children who read for pleasure are likely to do better in Maths and English than those who rarely read in their free time.’ (BBC News and Education).

As well as providing children with plenty of opportunities to read a variety of texts in school, children need to read daily at home, building up their confidence, language skills and developing a passion for reading.

We ask that you spend a small amount of time each day, reading school reading books. In addition to these books your child will select a library book of their choice on their library day and each half term will have chance of a ‘bonus read’ with the class ‘Reading Dog’ (a soft toy to bring home, to read a book of their choice to).

All reading activities in and out of school should be recorded in the Reading Diary.

Each Friday the class teacher will review the Reading Diary for comments and signatures. At the end of the half term, each class teacher will choose 6 children to spend quality time reading with Archie the Reading Dog, and his owner Mrs Beechey, in our school library. Selections will be based upon things like reading frequency (at least 5 times a week), parent/teacher comments, enthusiasm or progress made in reading.

We are raising the profile of learning times tables throughout KS1 and are introducing a new Mathematics challenge aimed at developing quicker recall of the multiplication facts (times tables).

The new National Curriculum states that by the end of Year 2, children should be able to fluently recall multiplication and division facts for the 2, 5 and 10 times tables.

Your child will be given a certificate in school for them to collect stickers once they are fluent in their 2x, 5x, 10x tables.

To achieve a sticker your child will be asked questions involving:

1. Different Words e.g. How many lots of 2 in 10?
2. Switchers e.g. What is 3 x 2 ? What is 2 x 3?
3. Four Facts e.g. 3x2 = 6 2 x 3 =6 6 ÷ 2 = 3 6 ÷ 3 =2

Please encourage your child to practise at home and once they feel super-confident they can ask their class teacher to ‘test’ them to see if they can achieve the sticker for their certificate. The ‘activities’ sheet gives you more ideas of fun tables games to play and useful websites.

Thank you for your support

Mrs Farmer

Mathematics Leader