Kingfisher Class – Year 1 and 2

Taught by Mr Vincent. Teaching Assistants – Miss Rhodes, Mrs Powell, Miss Kuehn, Mrs Heseltine and Mrs Stevens

School Year 2023/2024

General Information

Listening to your child read on a regular basis, for example 3 or 4 times a week really helps them to progress and your help is greatly appreciated.

It will be very helpful if you could please continue to do the following:

• Return the reading record to school each day with the books, even if they have not yet been read at home.
• When you read with your child, enter the date and title of the book in the reading record and sign your name.
• Feel free to comment on how your child has done, but please don’t feel that you must do this every time as just signing your name is fine.

Spellings

The test is every Friday. The children are tested on a specific phonic sound. For example, ‘igh’ in the word high. They will have already been tested on a specific sound before but we will revisit the sounds as they provide the children with good foundations of how to spell. On other occasions your children will receive ‘common exception’ words. These are just everyday words that children use when writing.

A quick reminder of good ways to practise learning spellings together:

• Read the word together out loud 3 times.
• Look, Cover, Write. Encourage your child to say the word by sounding it out, cover the word and then write the word, saying the sounds as they write.
• You can practise maybe just 3 words at a time, rather than all at once.
• If you are testing your child please say the words out of order or within a sentence.

Tests

On a weekly basis the children do BIG maths. This is a timed test and is a fun way to ‘speed up’ children’s arithmetic skills. They only compete against themselves to try and beat their own best score.

Year 2 children will take their SATS tests in Spring 2021 and we will discuss this with parents at parents evening nearer the time.

All Year 1 children complete an annual Phonics Screening Check in June of each year. The test comprises of 40 words for the children to read. Some of which are real words and some are made up. The children use their phonic skills to decode the words and pronounce them properly. There was no test in 2020 due to COVID-19.

SMIRFS

Your child is working on their SMIRF targets. You can find these in the front of their yellow reading record book.  Like last year, the aim for your child is to complete the targets to enable them to move onto the next planet. Instant recall of mental maths is really beneficial to your child’s understanding and further progress in maths.  Please encourage your child to practise these on a regular basis, just 5 minutes is perfect!

Times Tables Rockstars

This is a great website where the children practice their times tables (and the corresponding division facts). Each child has their own username and password to login. Hopefully all parents are aware of this site now but don’t worry if you’re not, just let me known and I’ll give you your child’s login details.

Useful websites: