Green Dragon Primary School

There are structures around us all the time, some of which we barely notice.

• What are they made from?
• What is their purpose?
• What do you notice about their shapes?
• What can be done to make them stronger?

Through this unit you will become builders and discover the secrets to holding up bridges and skyscrapers.

History

We will be developing our understanding of:

• How homes have changed over time
• How buildings have changed over time
• How to use key words and phrases relating to the passing of time

Geography

We will be developing our understanding of:

• The continents of the world
• Different homes around the world
• Differences between buildings in London and Dubai

Technology

We will design, make and evaluate:

• Our own London landmark buildings

Science

We will be developing our understanding of:

• Materials used for different buildings
• The properties of different materials and why they are used
• Conducting scientific experiments and asking scientific questions

Computing

We will know about:

• Basic computer vocabulary e.g. mouse, keyboard, keys, power

We use a knowledge organiser for every project in every year group. It is a helpful way for children and families to see the key knowledge that children will learn. This key knowledge helps the children ask more questions and then find out more information.

It would be helpful to talk with your child about this knowledge organiser. As the project develops, they will be able to share more knowledge. Thank you!

We will be revisiting and making sure we are confident in:

• Recognising and writing numbers 0-10
• Counting objects to 10
• Representing numbers in different ways using equipment

We will be reading the following books:

• The Three Little Pigs
• A Squash and a Squeeze by Julia Donaldson
• A New Home for a Pirate by Ronda Armitage

We will be making sure we are confident using our Phonics to spell words we need to use and writing simple sentences using capital letters and full stops.

School day:

The Year 1 school day starts at 8.50am. and finishes 3.10pm.

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.

Oxford Owl

Please read your Oxford Owl books for your phonics phase group.

https://www.oxfordowl.co.uk/

Username: hydra2 password: reading

Home Learning:

1. Daily reading - this is very important! Please listen to your child read, and read to them. Thank you! Reading changing book days are on your child’s book bag please return on these days so your child can be heard read and their book changed.

2. A short piece of work will be sent home once a week on a Friday – this will start after October half term. 

3. A task connected to project learning every half term. This will be set on DB - we will email you with more information.

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

Trips

We plan to visit the local area to look at all the interesting buildings. More information will be sent to you as soon as possible!

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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

There are two main ways to talk with your child’s teacher.

You can talk at the start or end of the day – remember that teachers have more time at the end of the day!

Alternatively, teachers check the year group email every day so you can contact them here: hydra@greendragon.hounslow.sch.uk

Teachers will respond between the hours of 8:00 and 4:00pm.