Dear Parents and children,
Many of you have asked for learning to be available to dip into over the summer holidays. The first thing you need to know is that despite this difficult year, full of disruption, the children have definitely risen to all the challenges they have been faced with. The combination of your help and support and our teaching, both face to face and online, has led them to make amazing progress. What a partnership! The children (and possibly you parents) definitely need a rest and need to recharge those tired batteries, and what better way than to spend some lovely time all together as a family, relaxing, having fun and hopefully enjoying some decent weather.
As a school we definitely do not want to set compulsory work to complete, however we know that six weeks is a long time and both you and the children may want to have some guidance. The best guidance we can give is to practise, practise, practise! Keep that love of reading active which will help that important vocabulary to grow, much needed for real success. Over summer children will be able to continue to quiz and I have a feeling many will keep trying to smash targets as they have been doing all year! Alongside this, every teacher will be providing guidance and activities for their specific year groups. These are overlearning, practise activities, which will help your child to keep their learning ticking over. You know your children best and you will know if this is something that would benefit them to do. You may decide to do little and often, you may decide to dip in and out or you may decide to use these activities the week before returning or not at all. As always we trust you to make your own decisions because you know what works best on the home front.
Journey to becoming a fluent reader
The best thing children can do over the summer, ready for Year 1 is to read. Please listen to your child read every day (encouraging them to use their phonics to sound out words) and also read to them. It is so important to model good reading and sharing a story together will grow that love of reading too.
Practising sounds, using flashcards would be a great help. I have uploaded some flashcards that you can print out below, please note they are designed to be printed back to back. These are the Read Write Inc. flashcards the children practise in school every day.
My hope is that by this time next year, your child will be a confident and fluent reader, with a love of reading. Reading everyday, discussing a book as you go along and practising the flashcards will accelerate them on their journey to fluency.
In Year 1, the children are challenged to learn sets of words, on sight. This means that they are able to read the word instantly, without having to use Fred Talk. The children currently in Year 1 and last years Year 1, have loved this challenge and it has had an amazing impact on their confidence when reading! There are 24 sets of words, which get slightly more challenging. In our classroom there is a very exciting display. The children can celebrate their own and other’s progress, on their journey to fluency, by moving their personalised hot air balloon, up the word sets.
I would LOVE if over the Summer the children could begin to practise these word sets. I have uploaded all of the word sets above for you to look at. It would be amazing if you could print or even write them out as flashcards. With each word, it is important to consider which bits are tricky. For example in the word ‘said’, the ‘ai’ is tricky because it makes the /e/ sound not /ay/ (snail in the rain).
Maths
It would be wonderful for your child to keep practising their number work, by having a go at some of the games below, as well as practising counting objects.
Have a go at 1 to 5 and 1 to 10.
I hope you all have a wonderful Summer holiday!
Take care and God bless,
Miss Lane