Reading
Our Class Text and Comprehension
In term 3, our reading comprehension lessons will be based upon our class text, “Topsy and Tim” by Jean Adamson. In this fiction text, we will join Topsy and Tim and they go on a trip to London. They stay in a house that belongs to Mummy’s best friend and Boris the cat. They see lots of landmarks. They ride on the London Underground, a bus and a boat. They enjoy their trip a lot!
In term 4, our reading comprehension will be based upon a non-fiction text, “The Great Fire of London”, by Susana Davidson, which will teach us all about the events leading up to The Great Fire of London. Will will look at how and where the fire started, and why the fire spread with such fury to have the destructive impact that occurred.
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 out daily Read Write Inc phonics lessons which children have access to books to read for pleasure at their individual accurate reading level. We also have access to complimentary book band reading books to encourage reading for pleasure.
Writing
Over the course of the term, we will be writing a postcard about a local landmark, writing directions for travelling around London and a visitors guide to London from a fictional character travelling from Kuala Lumpur.
Firstly, we will write postcards which enables the children to develop their topic vocabulary and present information concisely. In their postcards, they could include formulaic phrases to start and end their text and use ‘and’ to join words and clauses. We will use knowledge, learnt in our topic lessons and from further research, to plan and write our postcards.
We will also write a set of directions to travel on foot from one London landmark to another. The children will use this to list short commands in a clear sequence. There is also an opportunity to use positional language, such as ‘next to’ or ‘behind’; directional language, such as ‘left’ or ‘right’; and precise imperative verbs.
Furthermore, we will write a summary pack for a fictional Meerkat character who is travelling from Kuala Lumpur to London Zoo. This will enable children to put their skills into one information pack. Within this, they will list relevant clothing needed for each season; choose a London landmark to describe; draw a route from Euston Station and make an information poster about London Zoo.
Grammar, Punctuation and Spelling
Punctuation
This term we will learn to use capital letters for names of people and personal pronoun ‘I’; learn to use a question mark and write questions; learn to use an exclamation mark and write sentences that require an exclamation mark.
Grammar
This term we will learn to know names of places being with a capital letter; to learn that personal pronoun ‘I’ has a capital letter; orally retell a short story using conjunctions; revisit the understanding of the past to show an event has already happened; identify action/doing words; develop the skill of reading back over our sentences to check our writing; start to include conjunctions to join two ideas together; introduce the present, progressive and past tense; use of poetry to enjoy rhymes and expand vocabulary; and dictate short sentences that include full stops, question and exclamation marks
Spellings
During our spelling lessons we will learn words using the trigraph ‘-tch’; adding ‘-es’ to words of plural nouns; adding ‘-ing’ and ‘-er’ to verbs, adding an extra syllable e.g. hunting, kinder; words ending in ‘-y’; days of the whole week; common exception words: ‘were your’; numbers 0-10; practise more plurals adding ‘s and es’; adding ‘ed’ to make a past tense verb; compound words where two words are spelt correctly as if independent; common exception words ‘once, ask, friend, school, put, push, pull, full, house, our’; and digraph and trigraph focus.
To view our weekly breakdown of our spellings, please view our Term 3 and Term 4 Homework Grid.
In addition to these weekly spelling rules, we will continue to learn and spell words from the 1 statutory spelling list. For an overview of these spellings, please view the Spelling word list for Year 1