Supporting Your Child in Year 1
Supporting your child with English
English consists of 3 areas of learning. These are speaking & listening, reading and writing.
Speaking & Listening
The children are encouraged to improve their communication skills by speaking clearly and listening carefully. To support this development they will:
- Listen to and discuss stories and characters
- Contribute to class, group and paired discussions
- Take part in drama activities
Ways in which you can help your child:
- When giving instructions to your child, increase the amount of content and ask them to repeat the instructions back to you.
- Ask questions to encourage your child to add detail when they are talking to you about events during their day.
Reading
The children will be provided with many opportunities to read on a daily basis. They will take part in:
- Whole class reading with a teacher
- Adult led guided reading sessions
- Library visits
- ERIC (everybody reading in class) or D.E.A.R Time (drop everything and read)
As pare of 'Little Wandle Revised Letters & Sounds' (our school phonics programme) your child will take part in three reading sessions over the week. They will work on developing decoding (sounding out and blending), prosody (expression) and comprehension skills. The children will then bring the same book home to read to you. You may think this book is too easy for your child because they are reading it really well but this forms part of the programme and allows for success and pride in the skill. They will also bring home a sharing book. This is a book they have chosen for you to read to them. They will most likely be unable to read this by themselves but if you read it to them they will be able to engage with the story/text and see how books are read by example.
Ways in which you can help your child:
- Ensure their book bag is in school every day.
- Get into a good routine and set aside a short time to read on a one to one basis without distractions.
- Always talk about the story! Ask your child to tell you what has happened so far, to predict what will happen next and to suggest how different characters may be feeling.
- Remember that you don’t have to just read school books. Encourage enjoyment for reading by sharing comics, magazines or joke books and join the local library. (Click here for more local library information.)
Supporting your child with Maths
Maths is taught daily. The children will develop mathematical skills through practical and recorded work. Maths involve work on number, place value, shape, measures, time, data, problem solving and reasoning. The children will also be involved in individual, group and class investigations.
Throughout Year 1 the children will be taught to become really familiar with numbers to 10 in different contexts and then to 20. They should know: 1 more/less, doubles number bonds and what numbers look like in pictorial form. They should be able to recognise, read and form numbers from 0-10. We will use the vocabulary of comparing and ordering with these numbers. We will develop skills in addition, and subtraction (as 'take away' or 'difference') and use the related vocabulary. We will also use mental strategies to solve strategies to solve simple problems using counting, addition, subtraction, doubling and halving, and will explain methods and reasoning orally.
Ways in which you can help your child:
- Play number games and puzzles both at home and on the way to school e.g. 7 cars and 4 lorries make how many vehicles? How many wheels altogether? How many windscreen wipers?
- Play some of the Maths games on the following website: www.ictgames.com/resources
- Ask your child to count the change in your purse for you. Being allowed to spend half/20p/all the 5p pieces may help to offer incentive!
- Make a shop from tins of food/toys/books. Make the prices below 50p and involve giving change in simple ways.
- Sharing objects or food equally between family members or friends is a practical way of reinforcing division; changing the symbols in the sums can cover multiplication.
- Weigh out food or objects together when cooking or just for fun.
