Reading
Our Class Text and Comprehension
In term 5, our reading comprehension will be “Whiffy Wilson: The Wolf who wouldn’t go to school” by Carly Hart. In this fiction text, Wilson can’t count to ten, paint or read a book. He does not want to go to school. Wilson thinks school will be boring. He would rather watch telly and stay up late at night. His friend Dotty takes him to school and shows him what a fun place it is. Wilson has a lovely time and can’t wait to go back to school the next day.
In term 6, our reading comprehension will be based around two poems, “Today I’m not going to school” by Aoife Mannix and “Where do all the teachers go?” by Peter Dixon. We will a variety of complimentary poems throughout the term.
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 poems about what our school is like in the present day, and what is was like in the past. We will be writing diaries based in the Victorian era as well as writing letters to our current headteacher.
Firstly, we will be writing poetry which encourages the children’s creativity and develops their use of subject-specific vocabulary. The children will have to include a variety of verbs in their sentences and will be given opportunities to collect ideas by walking around the school. They will then celebrate their poems by reading them aloud to other children and hold a discussion about each other’s poems.
We will also write a diary to describe how children felt during a Victorian handwriting lesson. They will learn how to use sequencing words and formulaic phrases, including those to indicate the start and end of a text. Writing diary entries is a useful context for teaching the children how to express the thoughts and feelings of the writer, recounting events in a sequence of sentences.
Furthermore, the children will write a letter to the headteacher to explain how they are going to make a positive contribution to the school. Through writing letters, children can express their thoughts to another person in a sequence of sentences.
Grammar, Punctuation and Spelling
Punctuation
This term we will be asked to suggest what’s missing from sentences, including all types of punctuation learnt; encouraged to use full stops and capital letters in all of their writing; and to use question marks and exclamation marks correctly when appropriate.
Grammar
This term we will revisit describing words. Using them in the school environment and writing; recognise a sentence which is a question or an exclamation; learn when a sentence gives information or instruction; write simple instructions; learn simple conjunctions words; and read and write common irregular past tense; introduce the use of adverbs which describe how an action is done; compose oral and written sentences that describe an activity; create word banks of past tense verb which children can use as a resource; and build vocabulary about the wider world through outings and outdoor walks.
Spellings
During our spelling lessons we will revisit digraphs and trigraph including split digraphs; third person singular of verbs adding syllable e.g. she washes; adding ‘-ed’ to the word, sometimes making an extra syllable e.g. wanted; adding ‘-er’ and ‘-est’; learn new consonant ‘ph’; adding the prefix ‘un-‘; practise for phonics screening check; revise all words ending in ‘-y’; using ‘k’ for the ‘c’ sound; learning ‘ce’ to make ‘s’ sound; days of the week – practise independent spelling; and practise and check full set of Common Exp words.
To view our weekly breakdown of our spellings, please view our Term 5 and 6 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