Welcome to Year 1

Reading

We use the Big Cat reading scheme by Collins which follows the UK band band colours. This is to expose the children to a wide range of text types, characters and settings.

Oxford Level: 1 | Band: Lilac (Age appropriate for Reception)
Oxford Level: 1+ | Band: Pink (Age appropriate for Reception)
Oxford Level: 2 | Band: Red (Age appropriate for Reception)
Oxford Level: 3 | Band: Yellow (Age appropriate for Reception)

Oxford Level: 4 | Band: Light blue (Age appropriate for Year 1)
Oxford Level: 5 | Band: Green (Age appropriate for Year 1)
Oxford Level: 6 | Band: Orange (Age appropriate for Year 1)

Oxford Level: 7 | Band: Turquoise (Age appropriate for Year 2)
Oxford Level: 8 | Band: Purple (Age appropriate for Year 2)
Oxford Level: 10 | Band: White (Age appropriate for Year 2)
Oxford Level: 11 | Band: Lime (Age appropriate for Year 2)

Phonics

At New Horizons Children’s Academy we teach synthetic phonics from Nursery upwards moving to spelling rules in KS2. The following information is broken down into the different phases of learning throughout Early Years and Key Stage 1. Please use this SWAY to support you to aid your children with their phonics, reading, writing and articulation at home: https://sway.office.com/pWPp2FpwFMtwcD9g?ref=Link

In Year 1 the children’s phonics groups are differentiated to ensure children are reaching their full potential and appropriate support is given.  The Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised programme is used and children also have the opportunity to play various phonics games and reinforce their skills.

In June, the children will take part in the Phonics Screening Check. This is a statutory requirement for all children in all schools. A meeting to explain what happens during the check and how you can support your child at home with phonics will take place later in the year. The PowerPoint presentation for this meeting will be on our website under the ‘Our Community’ section.

Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised (Phase 4)

Review of Phase 3 graphemes and consolidation of the 42 graphemes through blending and segmenting CCVC and CVCC words with consonant clusters as Phase 4 of L&S Revised.

Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised (Phase 5)

The purpose of this phase is for children to broaden their knowledge of graphemes and phonemes for use in reading and spelling.  They will learn new graphemes and alternative pronunciations for these and graphemes they already know, where relevant.  Some of the alternatives will already have been encountered in the high-frequency words that have been taught.  Children become quicker at recognising graphemes of more than one letter in words and at blending the phonemes they represent.  When spelling words, they will learn to choose the appropriate graphemes to represent phonemes and begin to build word-specific knowledge of the spellings of words.

Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised:

We follow the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised programme for phonics. More information can be found here:

https://www.littlewandlelettersandsounds.org.uk/ 

Phonics Play:

We also use a website called Phonics Play to support the children with their phonics learning. This a great resource to try out and covers all the Phases from 1 – 6 as well as some really exciting games to consolidate your child’s learning.  At the moment, this website is currently free –so please log on with the following code and explore!

Learning in English and Maths

The information below provides details about the areas of learning that you child will cover whilst in Year 1. Children are expected to meet these requirements by the end of Year 1. These are based on the guidance from the National Curriculum (September 2014).