In year one, we continue to use the Bug Club Phonics scheme to support our teaching and learning of phonics and reading. Phonics is so important to us in Longships that we always start our day with it! Not only does it help us on our journey to a life long love of reading, but it also helps to unlock learning in other curriculum areas, as well as giving us the tools to express our ideas in our writing.
As in Tater Du, pupils will continue to be provided with reading books to enjoy at home. These books will be fully decodable and link directly to our phonics scheme. Books will be changed on Mondays and Thursdays, please be sure to record your child's reading in their "monkey" reading record.
To further support their phonics and reading at home, all pupils have access to their own workspace on Bug Club - click on the Bug Club icon to login! From their workspace, they are able to access a number of decodable books and phonics games online with the progress they are making.
We ask that children read daily for around 5 minutes a day at home. We change the books twice a week to allow children to read accurately on their first read, and then build fluency and understanding over the next few days. It is vital that children reach the reading standard at the end of year one to allow them to enjoy their learning, make progress and increase their independence in their own learning.
We share story time daily at the end of the day. We use a range of books chosen by the children, staff members and stories linked to our foundation subjects.
We are very lucky to have the most amazing library where we have library time once a week. Here we can share books, get cosy and grow our love of reading. All children are encouraged to take a library book home weekly.
Our English lessons focus on a book at a time where we learn the story and then are able to use our reading skills to understand the text, expand our word vocabulary and write amazing sentences.
In the Autumn term we used Rainbow Fish and Lost and Found to be able to write simple sentences and start to start using our new SPAG skills, making our writing more interesting to the reader through the use of adjectives and verbs.
The start of the Spring Term we will read The Way Back Home. We will continue to write simple sentences using all we have learnt so far and to start writing our own stories.