Helping Your Child Learn
Home Learning at Fair Furlong will contribute to our overall aim of raising pupil achievement and attainment by:
- Involving parents and carers as partners in their children’s learning
- Developing the ability of children to extend their learning outside of school and at times to develop their ability to work independently or collaboratively.
- Supporting children to revise and consolidate their previous learning and key skills
- Preparing our older learners for the demands of secondary school
How you can contribute
- Parents/carers are asked to complete reading diaries and these are monitored weekly. Children who are not reading regularly at home are encouraged to do so. Children are rewarded for reading at home 4 times per week with a raffle ticket each week for a termly draw.
- Where possible a weekly Home Learning club will run for KS2 children to support them in completing Home Learning. This will particularly target children who are vulnerable and where families may struggle to support.
- The staff will regularly hold exhibitions of children’s work and where appropriate workshops for parents to strengthen understanding of areas of study.
- At the beginning of each school year parents/carers will be provided with a guidance leaflet (also available on the school website) indicating Home Learning expectations and support.
We hope you will find some useful resources below to support your children at home.
HERE ARE SOME RESOURCES THAT YOU MIGHT FIND HELPFUL IN SUPPORTING HOME LEARNING .....
READING
We encourage you to hear your child read at home as often as possible (at least 4 times a week). Reading regularly at home will enable children to become confident readers and make good progress. Sign and date your child’s diary when you have heard them read at home. Teachers will check the reading diaries at least once a week to monitor their reading at home. Each child should have a reading book suited to their ability. This may be linked to their phonics sounds that they have been working on in school or their reading level. Once children have finished the numbered reading level books, they become free readers and can choose books from their classroom book corners. Children can independently choose and change their reading books, however staff will always help children choose if needed.
To encourage children to enjoy reading, they also bring home books from the reading passport challenge. These books are suited to the child's year group, but they may require an adult to read the book to them depending on their ability. If the children read all the books on the reading passport, they earn a reading prize.
Please come along to Tuesday morning Reading Cafe at 8:15 to get one of your weekly reading sessions in. Additionally, Thursday afternoon DEAR sessions are open from 2:50 - 3:15 where you can read with your child in their classroom and get another reading session complete. Local libraries are another brilliant place for children to explore books and have the opportunity to borrow books as often as they like.
If your child is struggling to engage with reading, please speak to class teachers as they will be able to provide ideas for support and suggest books that could be better suited to their interests.
PHONICS
.Phonics is a crucial part in helping children learn to both read and spell and is at the heart of our teaching across school. It is taught through engaging, multisensory lessons that are pacey and keep the children 'doing' from start to finish!
At Fair Furlong, phonics is taught in daily sessions throughout Reception and Year 1. However, the foundations for learning phonics begin in Nursery and the teaching and use of phonics is embedded throughout the reading and writing curriculum in all year groups.
As a school, we follow the progression outlined in the Letters and Sounds document produced by the government some years ago, but we also use actions and songs from Jolly Phonics and give the children opportunities to apply their phonics by reading phonically decodable books from a range of schemes.
In Nursery, children are taught to recognise sounds in the environment and begin to work on rhyme, alliteration and hearing first and last sounds in words. In Reception, they learn all the sounds in Phase 2 and Phase 3 of the Letters and Sounds programme and may also move into Phase 4. Year 1 recaps all of this but then takes the children through Phase 4 and Phase 5 and possibly into Phase 6.
The Letters and Sounds website is extremely useful for showing the order that sounds are thoughts in and for providing words and sentences for the children to read that contain those sounds.
The link to this is;
http://www.letters-and-sounds.com/
Jolly phonics songs can also be searched for and found on You Tube.
We endeavour to make phonics fun and active and hope you will enjoy working with your children on their phonics journey.
MATHS
Your child has a subscription to use Times Table Rockstars and Numbots
Times Table Rockstars is great for learning times tables and will receive rewards for improving their speed.
Numbots is designed to help children count quickly and build a mental image of the value of numbers.
If you have a problem logging on or would like some more information, please speak to you class teacher.