Welcome to Year 1
Welcome to our Year 1 page; we have two classes – 1PP and 1GA. Here you will be able to look at the exciting things we do throughout the year and use the links below to see the curriculum that we follow. Miss Barton (Y2 Teacher) is the Phase Leader for Year 1 and 2.
Meet the Teachers
Our Year 1 team consists of Mr Pearson (1PP Teacher), Miss Abe (1GA Teacher), Miss Williams (Teaching Assistant) and Miss Shaw (Teaching Assistant). Any of the Year 1 staff will be happy to discuss your child’s needs and interests with you.
PE
Year 1 have PE with our coach Brian on Monday mornings. PE is a compulsory subject and children are expected to wear the correct kit – yellow t-shirt, black shorts and black pumps (please name all items of clothing).
Homework and Spellings
Homework is given out every Friday and is due back in school by the following Wednesday. Spellings are given out on a Friday and children are tested on these the following Friday.
Reading
Reading is a fundamental aspect of children’s learning. Please make sure that your child brings their book bag to school every day along with their home reading books and reading record. Please read with your child at least three times per week and remember to comment and sign their reading record. This will allow staff to see how much your child is reading and enables school and home to work together in promoting your child’s reading journey. (For more information on reading and phonics please click here)
Year 1 Curriculum (document opens in new window)
Phonics Screening Check
Towards the end of Year 1 your child will take part in a phonics screening check. The Phonics Screening Check is a test for children in Year 1. Children take it during June in a one-to-one setting with a teacher. This is usually their class teacher.
Whilst children learn phonics to help them with both word reading and spelling, the Phonics Screening Check only tests their skills at word reading. This is sometimes called decoding.
During the Phonics Screening Check, children are asked to read (decode) 40 words. Most of these words are real words but some are pseudo-words. Pseudo-words are included to ensure that children are using their decoding skills and not just relying on their memory of words they’ve read before. Because some children may misread these pseudo-words based on their similarity to words in their existing vocabulary, each pseudo-word is clearly identified with an image of an alien. Most teachers and children, therefore, refer to pseudo-words as alien words.
The test itself is divided into two sections. Section 1 is the easier part. In this section, children are asked to recognise simple word structures and Grapheme Phoneme Correspondences (GPCs) from the earlier phases of the phonics curriculum. In 2019, real words included in Section 1 were words like ‘shop’, ‘peel’ and ‘yell’.
Section 2 is the trickier part of the test. Here, children need to recognise GPCs from the later stages of the phonics curriculum. They also encounter graphemes that correspond to more than one phoneme (e.g. the grapheme ‘ea’ represents different phonemes in the words bread and bead.) For more information on the screening please see our reading and phonics page