Year 1
Year 1 is a really exciting time for both the children and their parents. Moving from the Early Years Curriculum into Key Stage 1 might feel like a big step, but our curriculum ensures that the key skills that the children have developed from their time in Reception are built upon and their knowledge is enriched throughout their year.
Every morning we have Literacy and Maths lessons as well as phonics and reading practice. We start our afternoons engaging with high-quality texts reading class readers that are voted for by the children, and for the rest of the afternoon, we enjoy studying RE, Science, PE, Computing, Art, DT and RSE.
In Year 1 we take our faith seriously. We regularly attend Mass, we will begin to conduct and lead our prayer services and Collective Worship for our class in our classroom. Our altar is the focal point of our classroom, dressed in accordance with the colours of the liturgical calendar. Our daily prayers, hymn practices and participation at Mass enable us to learn and grow in our faith. We enjoy learning more about God and developing an understanding as to why Jesus coming to the earth was important and how we can live our lives using Jesus as a role model.
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 blend to read and segment to spell. Alongside the phonics scheme, reading practice will take place three times a week. The three sessions are broken up into:
- Decoding- reading the book, and developing decoding skills to build fluency.
- Prosody- reading the book with expression with a focus e.g.: commas, exclamation marks, narration etc.
- Comprehension- answering a range of questions based on the book that they have read.
These three sessions will develop the confidence in reading and encourage a love for reading.
Reading is a priority at St Ambrose Barlow Catholic Primary School, we are raising the profile and we promote reading for pleasure. We send home reading books every Monday and these are aligned with the child’s phonetic ability. We encourage the children to read for 10 minutes every night if possible. The children should be able to read 95% of the words in the book and be able to understand why they have read. The reading books provide types of questions to ask when the child has finished reading their book.
Spellings are given on a half-termly basis. Spelling tests take place on a Monday morning- the spellings follow a spelling rule that the children should know in Year 1.
The children will participate in a KS1 Nativity during December and a class assembly sometime within the academic year. At St Ambrose Barlow we feel that giving children the confidence to stand up and talk eloquently in front of others is a life skill. Assemblies are filled with their children’s work and we use them as a platform to show how much the children have learned and progressed throughout the year. We believe that God has given us gifts and talents and we must use them well.
Our Curriculum Overview will provide more detailed information on topics and activities planned throughout the year.
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