Hello and welcome to your first homework blog. Each week by Monday you will see a new blog appear on the Robin page with information about the week ahead. I will remind you about homework tasks and communicate the weekly spellings. I will use the same image for our weekly blogs so that you can easily find them.
We would love to see you at our Base One information evening on Tuesday where we can give more information on a typical Year 1 day and how we will communicate with you. We will start at 5pm in the Year 2 classroom.
First things first…The Robins have had a wonderful first week with us. They have settled really well and already know so many of our routines. This is fantastic because they are ready to learn. We have found the children really polite, kind and hard working – what a great start!
Homework:
*Spelling Week 1: each week we have 10 new spellings to learn. I will teach these on a Monday then each day we return to them and practise reading / spelling them and working on what is tricky. Throughout the year this will develop and we will spend more time then writing them – so by the summer term they will work on writing them in their English books. For now, we expect children to practise those at home using the pack given last week (this week use the words and activity for week 1). We also expect children to be logging into doodle spell (doodle spell is a separate app to doodle maths) to play some games to help them read and spell these. We do find that the link here between learning phonemes, learning to spell and read are really entwinned so this will help a number of skills and should only take about 5 minutes a day. Our spelling words this week: off, puff, sniff, miss, hiss, less, if, us, bus, yes. So our words all have the /f/ or /s/ sound which is sometimes spelt with double letters.
Spelling sheets can be returned to us for marking at the end of each half term when topic work is brought in for show casing.
Reading: We swap books on a Monday and Thursday (both swapping with home and school). It would really help us if children can have their book returns in their hands on Monday and Thursday mornings so that your child doesn’t carry these around all week! So please only return books on those two days. From our point of view, we have a lot of books to re-file and organise so it helps if we do this in bulk just two times a week. You should look out for new phonics books on these days. Again, we know children make the most progress when they re-read these several nights in a row so please do return to these a few times so that the children learn the words and can sight read. Most likely they will find the first read with you the trickiest but be really confident after that. We also advise that you use the phonics flash cards if you have them to help recap frequently. We use the RWI cards and will provide more information at the information evening on Tuesday.
Maths: we use doodle maths app (you will need both doodle maths and doodle spell but are free for you) to set some assignments based on what we have learnt at school and for children to do a few questions ‘5 a day’. Again, we find the children who use these frequently become confident in their maths so we advise using this daily. Doodle is a clever app and will provide tailored questions to your child – so do try not to help them with this. If they answer a question more slowly than another, it will generate more of those questions to help them progress. Each term there are challenges to engage and motivate your children and we will give prizes for these.
Topic homework: We have give you your topic homework menu sheet in the printed pack that came home last week but you can also find an online version on our ‘key information’ blog. Please choose one activity to do with your child for this half term and bring it in for the showcase lesson in October.
Lastly, we do have a trip – provisionally booked now for Monday 6th October (Year 1 in the morning) to the Framework Knitter’s Museum in Ruddington. Due to the high cost for a relatively short distance (!) of a coach, we are going to send out a forms tomorrow to look into asking parents to support with lifts or to consent to another parent bringing them and collecting them. This will bring the cost of the trip down to just £5 per head but obviously we do need to see if enough parents can support this. If you are able to begin considering this between yourselves as parents, we can then see if it is feasible. Unfortunately, without this, I think it will be too expensive to run. I will firm up timings by tomorrow but we would ask parents to collect children from school at about 9:25am, drive to the museum to arrive by approximately 9:40am and then on the return to collect children at 12:00pm to be back in school by 12:45pm. Please look out for that form tomorrow so that I can clarify if it can go ahead. We would also love some parents to stay for the morning if they are able to so do let me know if you can help that day. The cost for parents will be free. We really appreciate your support with this and I will get back to you when we have confirmed one way or another.