To those of you with any Welsh heritage (and to all Davids out there): happy St David’s Day. To all of you: we hope the weekend’s sunshine has cast some rays of happiness your way.
We begin the week with our assemblies, which fit with our Living and Learning theme of assessing risks:
- the Moortown Primary assembly comes from Mrs Weekes
- Miss Hague leads the Scholes (Elmet) Primary assembly
- the St James’ CE Primary collective worship is led by Mrs Rowley
The rest of today’s message is some information about teaching and learning from Monday 08 March onwards, when all our children are back at school. This information is for your interest, to help you to continue to support your child’s learning journey.
While maintaining a broad and balanced curriculum, we’re focusing on making sure all children are secure in some essential knowledge and skills in Reading, Writing and Maths that they need to support future learning. Every individual has had a different experience of learning at home and so teachers are taking care to understand any gaps that classes or individuals have, and adapt their teaching to address these.
Reading
We’ll focus on three main reading skills to help your child to be a great reader:
- phonics – we’re supporting children’s understanding through additional phonics sessions for younger children
- fluency – all children in Y1-Y4 have time dedicated to developing reading fluency; children in Y5 and Y6 are also developing reading fluency by reading with adults and as a whole class
- information retrieval, interpreting meaning and understanding language choices – these three vital reading skills, which are already embedded within our curriculum, have had a greater focus since September.
Writing
We’re making sure we recap on prior learning to make sure it’s secure before moving on, concentrating on teaching children the key essentials of grammar and punctuation. We’re focusing on sentences and short pieces of writing to build up the secure understanding, stamina and resilience needed for longer and more independent pieces in the Summer term.
Maths
Department for Education guidance for teaching mathematics at Key Stage 1 and 2 identifies the most important knowledge and understanding that pupils need as they progress from Year 1 to Year 6. From 08 March onwards, we’ll make sure we cover all six of these important concepts so your child is secure and ready to progress further:
- number and place value
- number facts
- addition and subtraction
- multiplication and division
- fractions
- geometry
Science
Our Spring 2 topic is different to what’s in the long-term plan featured on our website. This is so that we can catch up on Science learning blocks missed in the 2020 lockdown.
Topic
Our long-term plan originally featured Computing in Spring 2 – we swapped this to History to make the home learning easier.
Keep checking our messages across the week to make sure you and your child are prepared for Monday 08 March onwards.