Reading
Our Class Text and Comprehension
In term 1, our reading comprehension will be based upon the text ‘Wilfred Gordon McDonald Partridge’ by Mem Fox. This text is about a young boy who lives next door to a retirement home and who befriends some of the residents. The residents are all very unique and endearing. Wilfred has lots of wonderful conversations with them and they share lots of life lessons with him. The book explores the concept of memories and fondness.
To accompany the story by Mem Fox, we will use both ‘My Grandpa is Amazing’ and ‘My Grandma is Wonderful’ by Nick Butterworth. We will compare two books by the same author and discuss the different texts.
For further information about the reading skills we will focus upon this term, please view “Nightingale Class’s Sequential Reading Curriculum”.
Independent Reading
Ongoing, will be our daily Read Write Inc phonics lessons which children have access to books to read for pleasure at their individual accurate reading level. We also provide children with high quality picture books to take home to encourage reading for pleasure.
Writing
Over the course of the term, we will be writing autobiographies using our class topic as a stimulus for writing simple sentences about our own family lives to accompany our family trees. We will also be writing non-chronological reports as well as some short stories. We will learn a few old English riddles and have a go creating our own. Finally, we will write some Christmas themed short stories.
Firstly, we will be writing autobiographies which provides the children a confident place to start their writing, as they are writing about themselves and an area they feel confident in. The children will have to say aloud, the information they want to share and they are supported to scribe the sentence they want to accompany their family tree. Verbally children will learn about verb tenses and will be taught to use capital letters for names of people or places.
To further complement our history topic of learning about the 1950s, we will use the book, ‘My Grandma is Wonderful’ by Nick Butterworth, to scaffold our own short stories about an important older member of our own families. We will use the familiar story structure to support our writing. We will continue to orally build sentences and transition towards sequencing sentences together to form narratives.
After learning in depth about life in the 1950s, the children will write with persuasion to support their argument of whether they prefer the idea of living in the 1950s or the present day. Finally, we will write our own Christmas stories using the skills they have developed over the terms to create a short narrative.
Grammar, Punctuation and Spelling
Punctuation
This term the children will learn that sentences begin with a capital letter and to end their sentences with a full stop. We will discuss the use of question marks and exclamation marks during shared reading.
Grammar
This term we will model simple oral and written sentences as examples of clear units of meaning; write simple dictated sentences from memory; know that names of people begin with a capital letter; name people and their jobs in and out of school; and model re-reading to check writing makes sense.
Spellings
This term we will learn a selection of Year 1 statutory spellings words in small groups; the days of the week; and words ending in ‘-y’-. To view our weekly breakdown please see our
For an overview of the statutory spellings, please view the Spelling word list for Year 1