Green Dragon Primary School

What do living things such as animals and plants need in order to survive and grow? Do humans have the same needs?

What is the difference between a living thing and something that has never been alive? We are going to find the answers to these key questions in this project.

Science

We will be able to:

• Ask questions connected to the science we are learning
• Make observations and perform simple tests
• Group and classify the plants and animals
• Suggest answers to our questions

We wil know:

• A variety of common plants and animals and be able to identify, draw and label specific parts

We will be developing our understanding of:

• What animals and humans need to survive and grow
• How living and non-living things are different
• How humans and animals grow and change
• How to carry out a survey of living things
• How to attract wildlife to our environment

Geography

We will be able to:

• Use geographical vocabulary to describe the geography of Antarctica, Northern Ireland and the United Kingdom

We will be developing our understanding of:

• Similarities and differences of physical geography in Antartica and Northern Ireland

Technology

We will know:

• How to make and design a bird feeder

We will be developing our understanding of:

• How to have a healthy and varied diet to prepare dishes
• Where food comes from

Art

We will know:

• About the work of a range of artists, craft makers and designers and make links to our own work: Claude Monet, Van Gogh, Georgia O’Keefe

Here and There regions:. To help develop Green Dragon’s knowledge of Geography, and International Mindedness, each year group learns about a different region in the world every half term. Year 1’s ‘there’ region is the continent of Antarctica, and ‘here’ region is Northern Ireland – if you have any items or photos or stories from here, please let us know!

• Place value using multiples of 10
• Addition and subtraction within 100
• Number facts within 10
• Multiplication of 2s, 5s and 10s

We will be reading the following books and using these to help with our speaking, listening and writing:     

• Superworm by Julia Donaldson
• Jack and the Beanstalk by Joseph Jacobs
• Lost and Found by Oliver Jeffers

School day:

The Year 1 school day starts at 8.50am. Your child needs to enter school through the main gate and walk through the KS1 playground. Staff will direct your child. Your child needs to be collected from the KS1 playground at 3.10pm.

All adults dropping off or picking up children must wear face masks from now on. Thank you. Please ensure you stay two metres away from other families.

Trips

Hopefully you can go on some walks around our beautiful area now the weather is improving? Send us photos of animals and plants that you see.

Here are some places you could take your child:

• Local park
• River Thames
• Garden centre
• Gunnersbury Park
• Osterley Park
• Kew Gardens – school has free tickets

Oxford Owl

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

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

Username: hydra2 password: reading

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

**************************************************************************************************************************************

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