What to expect in Year 1
Year 1 is a really exciting time for you and your child as they will be learning lots of new skills and developing their understanding of the world. Your child’s day will be more structured than it was in Reception but we still love storytelling, practical maths and exploring topics in engaging ways.
There is a Year 1 statutory phonics screening test in June. This will identify if your child can read phonically decodable words. Your child will have a daily phonics session to teach them how to segment and blend to read and segment to spell.
Maths in Year 1 largely focuses on numbers to 20, ensuring children have a deep understanding of the foundational concepts within mathematics. Once this is secure, we begin to transfer and develop these skills and understanding with numbers to 50. Throughout this learning we use lots of manipulatives (e.g. ten frames, double sided counters, rekenreks, cubes, etc) and pictorial representations so that children can visualise these mathematic concepts.
What to expect in Year 2
Being the eldest children in Key Stage One (Infants), this is the year that children take on new responsibilities and develop a higher level of independence. In Year 2, the children continue to develop their knowledge and skills across the curriculum, learning through engaging and exciting topics and activities.
Once the children have completed the phonics programme, their reading development is focused around fluency and comprehension as well as nurturing a love for reading. Children are exposed to a wide range of rich literature through reading lessons in school and access to high quality texts that they can take home to read.
Maths in Year 2 aims to develop the children's growing understanding of mathematical concepts by working with numbers to 100 as well as learning brand new concepts such as multiplication and division. As in Year 1, the use of manipulatives and pictorial representations of these concepts remain very important for the children to fully understand them.
Supporting your child’s learning at home
Reading
Reading at home with your child is so important. It helps them to develop their learning in lots of areas. Reading just a few pages a day will increase your child’s confidence and get them into the routine of practising and applying their phonic knowledge Sometimes your child may want to read a book from home. As long as they are reading, that’s fantastic. Most children this age really love to read new and familiar stories as well as comic books and magazines. Please make sure you sign the Reading Diary so that we can keep track of where your child has got up to in their books.
Spellings
Spellings are an important part of your child's writing. We practise a new set of spellings each week to learn the various spelling patterns in the English language. These are practised daily in school through various activities and in the children’s writing. We have our spelling test every Friday so it is really important for the children to practise these at home, little and often, to give them lots of exposure to these.
Maths
Learning and rehearsing basic maths at home is time very well spent. Good things to practise include:
Year 1:
- count forwards and backwards to 100,
- recognise 1 more/1 less,
- recognise odd and even numbers,
- count in 2, 5 and 10
- know their number bonds to 10 (pairs of numbers that make a bigger number, eg 3 and 2 make 5)
- Number bonds to 10 and 20 and use these to solve problems with bigger numbers (eg use 3 + 2 = 5 to solve 30 + 20 = 50)
- Doubling and halving
- Times tables – we hope that children are able to recall the multiplication and division facts for the 2, 5, and 10 times tables by the time they leave Year 2.
Most importantly…
Try to keep any home learning light, and don’t push it if they seem tired or reluctant. The most important thing is to talk with your child about their learning and enjoy seeing the enthusiasm on their face.
