This week’s message includes some ways to support your child at home with Maths, written by Mrs Allaway, the Sphere Federation Maths Leader. Sandwiched in between, a couple of useful reminders…

School day

Have you let us know your thoughts on changes to the school day? Our very short survey is open for one more week.

Maths

What are we learning in Maths?

In Key stages 1 and 2, our Maths curriculum is divided into blocks of learning. These include different aspects of maths such as place value, addition and subtraction, multiplication and division, geometry, fractions, measures and statistics. Each block is broken down into a sequence of small manageable steps in learning, with each step building on the previous one.

Years 1 and 2

In the autumn term, our blocks of learning are place value, addition and subtraction, and shape.

A significant amount of time is spent on developing a deep understanding of the composition of numbers so that children become confident and fluent in both counting and recalling number facts. The crucial number facts are simple addition and subtraction facts. Regular short bursts of practice on NumBots will help with this. In school, we use a wide range of practical resources to support understanding of these key concepts.

When learning about shape, children are supported to recognise, draw, compare and sort different shapes alongside using the related mathematical vocabulary.

Years 3 and 4

In the autumn term, we cover three blocks of learning: place value; addition and subtraction; and multiplication and division.

It’s essential that children become increasingly fluent with whole numbers and the four operations, including number facts. These facts need to be really secure so that children can develop efficient written and mental methods and perform calculations accurately with increasingly large numbers. Times Tables Rock Stars will help with learning times tables up to 12 x 12.

We continue to use a range of practical resources. We use these to support children’s understanding of concepts and procedures – so they can see the maths. Ultimately, the expectation is that children can do the maths without the resources.

Years 5 and 6

In the autumn term, our blocks of learning are place value, the four operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication and division) and fractions.

Children extend their understanding of the number system and place value to include much larger numbers – up to 10 million.

Children are supported to become fluent in written methods for all four operations, including long multiplication and division. Children develop their skills to solve a wider range of increasingly complex problems that draw on these arithmetic skills.

When learning about fractions, children develop their understanding of equivalent fractions and use these to add and subtract fractions with different denominators. In order to be successful with this, children need to be fluent with times tables. Short bursts of regular practice on Times Tables Rock Stars will help to keep these skills sharp.

As always, speak to your child’s teacher if you’ve any questions, comments or concerns about your child’s learning in Maths.

JLT elections

We’ve recently launched this year’s Junior Leadership Team election process. Our Junior Leadership Team is one of the ways that children are encouraged to take an active part in pupil voice.

The election process allows children to develop an understanding of one of the British Values, democracy, with two representatives from each class chosen democratically by their peers.

Here are some of the qualities our junior leaders think are needed to be an effective JLT member.

• use the 8Rs for learning
• be respectful and polite
• help others
• be a good speaker and listener (to members of your class and in the meetings)
• share and be confident with your ideas
• let others speak
• accept the views of others even if you don’t agree
• be friendly and approachable
• follow our school rules and make good choices in class and around school

This weeks’ whole school homework is all about the election and democracy, ready for the elections next Thursday 20 October.

Have a happy and healthy weekend.

It certainly feels like Autumn these days – as well as shorter days and autumn colours, another sign of Autumn is the excited children showing us their conkers collected on the way to school! This week’s message includes two important messages (about medical conditions and attendance), and two more parts (about communications and this week’s Watch Us While We Work).

Attendance update

In the last school year (2021-22), the national average was 95.4% attendance. Our school attendance was 95.6% – we’re above the national figure, which is good to see.

We all know that attendance matters – the more your child is in school, the more they learn and the more they develop social skills.

Attendance is even more important following the disruption in learning caused by Covid – we’re now starting to identify gaps in learning and working hard to address this, but we need your child at school.

Thank you to everyone who makes sure their child is in school as much as possible.

Medical conditions

When your child joins school, we always ask about any medical conditions so we can support your child in school. This includes letting us know about allergies. This is a reminder only: please do make sure you tell us about medical conditions, especially nut allergies and other food allergies. Based on what you tell us, we’ll make reasonable adaptations to meet your child’s needs.

A word about how we communicate

A small number of you told us in the Summer 2022 annual parent/carer survey that we send home too many communications. We’ve thought hard about the comments, but also considered other feedback that tells us you welcome how we communicate. In the end, we’ve decided that we’re getting it about right for most of you. However, we thought it might be useful to let you know the different ways that we communicate things with you.

Firstly, anything urgent (such as the cancellation of an after-school club) or a quick reminder about something (like the photographer being in school) is sent by text. If you have the School Gateway app, it may be useful to set it so you receive notifications of messages. Texts are automatically sent to your app, if you have it installed (it’s free for us to communicate with you this way).

The weekly Friday message contains important information (eg nuts, attendance and about things coming up, such as parent-teacher meetings) as well as other information that we think you might find useful (eg like this one). We usually use sub-headings to help you navigate the message so you can find the information you need.

Most letters are emailed out to you, too. We’re moving away from sending out hard copies of letters (it’s better for the environment to send things electronically and things sometimes don’t always get to you if they’re sent home in book bags). Please try to check your emails daily, so you don’t miss anything important.

For anything relevant to your child’s class, check out the Class News pages of our website (we recommend doing this at least once a week). Nursery and Reception tend to put reminders on their Class News page, as they don’t have a homework page.

Your child should bring home a hard copy of their weekly homework, but you’ll also find it on the Homework page of the website.

Finally, we do have Facebook and Twitter. These just provide additional little snippets, if you want them, but nothing urgent or important will be posted on social media as we realise that not everyone accesses these things.

Finally, a thank you…

…to everyone who attended this week’s Watch Us While We Work session. It was great to see so many of you in school, keen to get a flavour of school life  (eg ‘I loved hearing the children read the Michael Rosen poem with so much enthusiasm’) and to pick up some tips to help you continue to support your child at home (eg ‘I liked seeing the reading with expression – we’ll do this at home’).

Look out for the next session: Thursday 26 January 2023.

Have a happy and healthy, awesome and autumnal weekend!

Our message this week is an important one because it’s all about reading. The message comes from Mrs Latham (our Phonics and Early Reading Leader) and Mr Catherall (our acting Reading Leader, covering a maternity).

Early Reading and Phonics

We’ve started the year as we mean to go on – reading! Our Reception children have started Phonics lessons already – they’re rapidly acquiring the skills to become readers. We use the government validated systematic synthetic phonics scheme Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised.

Children in Year 1 and Year 2 have also got back into Phonics lessons quickly. The lessons happen every day and last half an hour (Reception children build up to this over time). In these lessons, children are taught how a letter or letters (graphemes) match to sounds (phonemes).

We also have reading practice groups for children to use and apply their phonics skills. These are small group sessions, led by an adult, where children read a book that’s matched to the phonics phase for the children in that group. The time to do this has been made available by moving to allocating e-books for children. The e-books are essential for children to share their phonics reading success at home. Please make sure you hear your child read the e-book every week.

Year 1 or 2 children who have secure phonic knowledge will begin to access a wider variety of books in school and to take home.

Children will also take a sharing book home to develop a love of reading. These books are to enjoy together and read for pleasure. Enjoy stories, predict what might happen and use different voices for the characters. Information books (non-fiction) can also be so much fun to share – finding out facts and discussing new information. Above all – make it fun!

Our recent reading workshop explains phonics and early reading in more detail.

Key Stage 2

‘Reading for pleasure is the single most important indicator of a child’s success.’ (OECD 2002)

Should my child be reading at home?

In Sphere Federation schools, we insist that children read at home. Failure to do so would mean that children are missing out on the numerous benefits of reading. Research tells us that children with reading difficulties are more likely to experience mental health problems later in life. To give our children the best chance of becoming readers at home, we ensure that reading at home is celebrated.

What should my child be reading?

Occasionally, we get feedback that adults at home aren’t sure what book their child is reading and when it should be in school. As children progress from Key Stage 1 to Key Stage 2, we want them to have more choice and ownership of what they read.  For some families, this can feel less structured than it might have done when children were lower down school. Because of this, we’ve made some changes to how we read in Key Stage 2. Starting after the October half-term, we’ll be moving to a more structured system for reading at home.

What will this look like?

Our children are provided with the opportunity to read a variety of rich texts in school and at home. Children are always involved in the process of choosing what book they read at home and we place a high emphasis on choice of text. To ensure our children read a suitable range of suitable texts, we rotate between ‘solo reading’ and ‘group reading’ on a half-termly basis:

• Autumn 1: solo reading
• Autumn 2: group reading
• Spring 1: solo reading
• Spring 2: group reading
• Summer 1: solo reading
• Summer 2: group reading

Next half-term, your child will be ‘group reading’. This means, they’ll choose a book that they’ll read alongside some of their class mates. They’ll be set a target page to read to and will discuss what they’ve read with their group and an adult.

What if my child wants to read other books, too?

We love this! We’d really encourage you, if you can, to have lots of books at home. A trip to a book shop can be a wonderful and inspiring shared experience as a family – especially as the days are getting shorter and wetter! If you prefer to shop online, great! We’ve recently signed up with Love Reading 4Kids. This is a great website with a huge range of books at good prices. And, if you buy through this site you can support us here school – we’ll receive 25% of the value to spend on books!