Green Dragon Primary School

Clothes are an important part of our lives. They can keep us warm or cool. We can wear different colours and designs and change them for different occasions, we can follow the latest fashions – and even make them ourselves! We will be learning about different clothes from different cultures. We will share our knowledge of clothes!

Geography

We will be able to:

• Find the United Kingdom and Ghana on a world map
• Find and name some of the countries, oceans and seas between UK and Ghana
• Find and name the continents of Europe and Africa, as well as name the other continents

Technology

We will be able to:

• Plan, create and evaluate our weaving
• Use simple tools and materials to weave

Science

We will know:

• The names of different materials, e.g. wood, plastic, glass
• The names of the four seasons as well as changes connected to them, e.g. weather, day length

We will be able to:

• Describe and sort materials according to their properties
• Carry out and evaluate simple experiments

History

We will know:

• About the British police office, John Kent, and how uniforms

have changed over time

Art

We will be able to:

• Recreate designs by Cath Kidston, William Morris, Ghanian and Scottish fashion designers

International

We will develop an understanding that:

• Different cultures and religions wear different clothes and to respect this

We will know more about:

• The seven continents
• The five oceans
• Seasons in different countries

We will be developing our understanding:

• That countries have different seasons and weather

These are the skills we will be practising this term:

• Recognising numbers 10-20
• Writing numbers 10-20
• Counting one more and one less than a given number
• Understanding that a number is made up of tens and ones

We will be reading:

• The Smartest Giant in Town by Julia Donaldson, The Elves and the Shoemaker, and Jamela’s Dress by Niki Daly.

We will be:

• Retelling the story and innovating (changing) the story
• Writing simple sentences with a capital letter, fingers spaces and full stop
• Writing letters, diary entries and poems

PE Kits

School PE uniform is black shorts (or tracksuit bottoms) with a white t-shirt and trainers. All children will come to school wearing PE kit on their PE days. Year 1 PE days are: Mondays and Wednesdays.

Home Learning:

All of our homelearning countiues to be online this year. Each with week there will be a mathletics task, DB task and reading. We will set weekly tasks for your child on the website, as well as weekly tasks on Purple Mash and Mathletics.

The tasks will be set each Friday and due in by the following Friday. We are looking forward to seeing all your fantastic work! Please talk to or email the year 1 staff know if you are having trouble with your online home learning OR if you have any issues with logging in let a member of the Year 1 Team know.  hydra@greendragon.hounslow.sch.uk

Entry Point:

Come dressed in your favourite or your special clothes – Friday 8^th January. Be ready to tell us why you love them so much!

Exit Point: Fashion show – date to be confirmed. Get excited!

Phonics and Reading

Please ensure you continue to read with your child every day and write a comment in the yellow reading journal when you are able.

Use your phonics mats we sent home to practise your sounds and writing simple sentences.

Any questions about phonics or reading please speak to one of the Year 1 team.

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Symptoms of COVID-19 or of a cold:

You will be asked to follow the COVID-19 guidance for households with possible infection coronavirus guidance.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/covid-19-stay-at-home-guidance.

You will be asked to have your child tested for COVID-19 as this could have an impact on our school. This can include testing for all children and their families, if displaying symptoms.

*If your child does not take a test, your household will have to isolate following government guidance – please contact the school for more information.

At Green Dragon Primary School we teach phonics using ‘Letters and Sounds’. 

What is phonics?
Phonics is the system of ‘blending’ sounds together to read, and ‘segmenting’ sounds to spell. They are both complimentary and interlinking skills that are taught together. You may hear your children use some vocabulary that you are not familiar with that they have learnt in their phonics lessons.

A phoneme 
Is the smallest unit of sound that we use in the English language. A phoneme can be made up of one letter as in the alphabet sounds – s, a, t, p, i, n etc, or two letters (a digraph) as in sh, ch, th, ay, ar, or three letters (trigraphs) as in air, ear, ure. Phonemes can not be broken down into separate sounds.

A grapheme
Is the way we spell a phoneme. A phoneme may have only one grapheme,for example ‘b’. Or may have several different spellings –for example or can be spelt ‘or’ in torn, ‘aw’ in claw, ‘au’ in naughty or ‘ore’ in more. The children will initially be introduced to one common grapheme for each phoneme, but as they progress through the school they will taught the less common spelling alternatives and encouraged to try and choose the correct grapheme for a particular word they are trying to spell.

Consonant blends
Are made up of two or three phonemes blended together quite quickly as we learn to read. Examples are sc, sm, bl, pr, str

Short Vowel Sounds
Are the vowels saying their sound as ‘a’ in c a t.

Long Vowel Sounds
Are the vowels saying their name as ‘ay’ in day, ‘oa’ in boat or ‘igh’ in night.

How do we teach Phonics at Green Dragon  Primary School?

We follow the Letters and Sounds programme Letters and Sounds is a phonics resource published by the Department for Education and Skills in 2007. It aims to build children’s speaking and listening skills in their own right as well as to prepare children for learning to read by developing their phonic knowledge and skills. It sets out a detailed and systematic programme for teaching phonic skills for children starting by the age of five, with the aim of them becoming fluent readers by age seven.

There are six overlapping phases. Below is a summary based on the Letters and Sounds guidance for Practitioners and Teachers. For more detailed information, click here to visit the Letters and Sounds website.

Phonic Knowledge and Skills

Phase One 
Activities are divided into seven aspects, including environmental sounds, instrumental sounds, body sounds, rhythm and rhyme, alliteration, voice sounds and finally oral blending and segmenting.

Phase Two 
Learning 19 letters of the alphabet and one sound for each. Blending sounds together to make words. Segmenting words into their separate sounds. Beginning to read simple captions.

Phase Three
The remaining 7 letters of the alphabet, one sound for each. Graphemes such as ch, oo, th representing the remaining phonemes not covered by single letters. Reading captions, sentences and questions. On completion of this phase, children will have learnt the “simple code”, i.e. one grapheme for each phoneme in the English language.

Phase Four
No new grapheme-phoneme correspondences are taught in this phase. Children learn to blend and segment longer words with adjacent consonants, e.g. swim, clap, jump.

Phase Five 
Now we move on to the “complex code”. Children learn more graphemes for the phonemes which they already know, plus different ways of pronouncing the graphemes they already know.

Phase Six 
Working on spelling, including prefixes and suffixes, doubling and dropping letters etc.
Recommended: the Synthetic Phonics Toolkit

Understanding Phonics                            Phonics Screening