Year 1 Year Group Page

🌟 Welcome to Year 1! 🌟

Hello and welcome from Miss Cardy, Emma and Morgan!

Year 1 is a transformative year, which is why we love it! It can be tricky to navigate at the start, with an increase in formal lessons and the introduction of new subjects. From History and Geography to D.T and Art, Year 1 marks the start of the Key Stage 1 curriculum. Children transition away from group work and choosing time to whole-class activities and lessons, and the progress made in the year is simply exceptional.

Curriculum Overview

Important Dates & Events

PE Days 🥎

Our PE days are Tuesday and Friday. Both lessons are taught by the class teacher. In the event of a cover teacher, the PE that day may need to be missed and a longer PE lesson taught by the class teacher on the next Tuesday or Friday - The children love to remind me that I promised ‘long PE’!

Trips

3rd December 2025 - Christmas Experience at Christ Church

Class Assembly 🎭

30th January 2026

Classroom Life

In Year 1, we celebrate success by:

Bringing home Pikachu.
Collecting Dojo Points.
Collecting ‘cinema tickets’ (not sure where the name came from, but it stuck!). Once children have collected 5 tickets they may choose a prize from the prize box. Cinema tickets are rarer than dojo points, so getting one is always quite exciting.
We also hand out one postcard and one Honour Award each Friday during celebration assembly.

Support for Parents/Carers

🔠 Phonics

Phonics is the most important part of Year 1. Without phonics confidence and sound knowledge, writing cannot progress as rapidly. Please ensure that children are reading their phonics book to you daily. It is important to practise the individual sounds, red ‘tricky’ words and read the book with increasing speed throughout the week.

🖋️ Writing

A word should be phonetically plausible - writing independently in grammatically correct sentences is more important than correct spelling, as long as the word can be read back in accurate sounds.

E.g. ‘Yoonicorn’ instead of ‘unicorn’, ‘tighdee’ instead of ‘tidy’.

As the children learn more sounds, we would expect them to begin to use different versions of the same sound. For example, a-e instead of ay. Cake instead of cayk. Where two letters make one sound we call these a ‘special friend’. A split, like a-e is a chatty friend.

Children often want to write lots and lots, but do not understand where a full stop goes. Teaching sentences as ‘Who is doing what?’ is often the approach we would take - we need to know the who, what they were doing and where/to what. Then our idea is finished and we can put a full stop.

E.g. Little Red is walking to Grandmas. The wolf is hiding in bed.

By the end of the year, children should be able to connect around 5-6 sentences minimum into a short story to be at the expected standard. They will also need to use ‘and’, use the suffixes -es, -s, -ing and -ed with high levels of accuracy. These are good to correct if you see the mistake being made. For example, ‘walked’ instead of ‘walkt’ (Children so often want to put a t!)

🧮 Maths

Here are important skills to practise at home.

Learning the basics of number composition is really important. For example, understanding that 7 can be made of 6 and 1, or 3 and 4.
Making numbers with physical resources such as counters
Later on in the year, ensuring that children can make numbers to 100 with the appropriate number of tens and ones. For example, 71 is made of 7 tens and 1 one.
Number bonds to 10 and 20
Counting forwards and backwards in 2s, 5s and 10s by the end of the year.
Reading numbers as digits and words .

Learning Resources

Phonics

Videos will be uploaded to Google Classroom each week to practise the sounds your child has been learning in their sessions.

https://www.phonicsplay.co.uk/resources is a great website. 3 games are free, or a subscription is £6 a year.

For parents, here is how to say each sound:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hi5TtqlEbP8

Maths

Number bonds to 10: Number bonds -> Make 10

https://www.topmarks.co.uk/maths-games/hit-the-button

Number bonds to 20: Number bonds -> Make 20

https://www.topmarks.co.uk/maths-games/hit-the-button

Numbers to 15 words and numbers/counting: