The Year 1 team

In Year 1 our teachers are Mrs McDonnell and Mrs Smith.  Mrs McDonnell teaches us on a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday and Mrs Smith teaches the class on a Friday.  Our teaching assistant is Mrs Poulter.

Routines

Reading books:

As part of our whole school phonics scheme, we will listen to each child read a Monster Phonics book in Guided Reading groups three times a week. On a Tuesday, the children will be shown their new book and will read the same book on a Wednesday and Thursday. A brief explanation of how to follow the activities is included in the books. 

On a Thursday your child will bring this book home to develop further fluency practise. Please record when your child has read this book with an adult in their Reading Record. Their Monster Phonics book and Reading Record needs to be returned to school the following Tuesday where they will be given a new book.

For more information on how to support the reading of Monster Phonics books at home please go to: https://monsterphonics.com/guide-to-reading-monster-phonics-books/

Children will also have a library book to encourage reading for pleasure. This is a ‘free choice’ book and will include high quality vocabulary for children to be exposed to. It is really important that children have opportunities to listen to high quality texts that are modelled by adults. These books will create discussion around language, vocabulary and related experiences.This book can be changed whenever and does not need to be recorded in your child's Reading Record.

Your child will receive team tokens and stickers for reading at home so please remember to record when your child has read with you!

PE:

On a Tuesday we have JB Sports coaches in school to teach our PE lessons; on this day we need to come to school in our PE kit.

PE kit should be:

• Plain white t-shirt
• Black/navy shorts.
• Trainers or Plimsolls can be worn for PE lessons.
• Black/Navy tracksuit bottoms for colder weather/outdoor PE.
• Black/Navy tracksuit top for colder weather/outdoor PE.
• No Football/Sports shirts

Spellings:

Your child will be learning their Year 1 Common Exception Words, which are a statutory requirement and are important words that your child will benefit from spelling independently. These are often words that have "tricky" spellings so we explicitly teach them throughout our phonics sessions. A list of them is identified below.

It would be advantageous to support your child with these words at home so that your child feels confident in being able to read them and write them.

We are shining a light on...

Allan Ahlberg - he wrote our Power of Reading story "The Jolly Postman" 

As a school, we follow the Monster Phonics scheme

to support the teaching of early reading.

What is Monster Phonics?
Monster Phonics makes learning to read and spell through phonics easier, by
categorising the 44 sounds into 10 categories and each of these 10 categories are
represented by a Monster.  Each Monster is a different colour, and this colour
represents that way of spelling the sound.  This makes learning to read and spell
much easier and more fun.

Why does Monster Phonics improve learning?
The child learns through the assignment of colour and the linkage of the sound, as
well as seeing the colour, creating more ways of remembering the spelling.
The games, songs and activities within the programme continuously reflect this way
of learning, so that structure is constantly seen, heard and experienced by your child.
This consistency is critical in ensuring that a complicated language is learnt in the
most simplistic way. 

High-frequency words are learnt much faster with Monster Phonics. These words
make up 65% of the words used in reading.

1. Once colour-coded, high-frequency words can be taught in easy to learn sets
of similar words. This significantly improves spelling.

2. With colour-coding non-decodable words become decodable. Children are no
longer told that words like ‘they’ and ‘my’ are tricky as they can be decoded.

To find out more about how Monster Phonics works visit https://monsterphonics.com/how-it-works/