Plaxtol Primary School
Learning together - school, family, community
Hedgehog Class
Welcome to Hedgehog Class!
We are Year 2 and our teachers are Mrs Wright and Mrs Mitchell. Our teaching assistant is Miss Newstead who works every day in Class 2.
Weekly Timetable and Curriculum Overview
Home Learning
Please read with your child for 10 minutes each day and initial in their reading records. New reading books will be sent home every Tuesday and Friday. Please make sure your child brings their reading book to school every day so they can be used in their group reading sessions.
A spelling/grammar and maths game or activity will be set on your child's EdShed account every Friday.
A handwriting sheet will also be handed out every Friday.
Phonics & Reading
Phonics teaching and learning is an important strategy in early reading. We teach reading using the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised scheme, which is a systematic synthetic phonics programme. This is an approach that enables children to learn letters (graphemes) and their associated sounds (phonemes). Children can then use this phonic knowledge to decode words to read them.
In year 1, the children have daily phonics sessions. These sessions involve reading sounds, and blending them to read words. As some words are not decodable phonetically, the children are taught to read these words by sight, as a whole word. These are referred to as ‘tricky’ words.
Additionally, the children are given a reading book which has been carefully matched to their current reading level. Your child should be able to read this book fluently and independently. At home, please listen to them read the book and once they have read it, talk about the book together. Your child needs to develop fluency and confidence when reading and so reading it more than once, will help to improve this.
Of course, in order to encourage your child to become a lifelong reader, it is important that they learn to read for pleasure. They can bring other books home from school, from the class selection or the school library. Your child may not be able to read this book independently and so it is encouraged that they read it with an adult at home. Other reading skills can be honed in this way, for example, discussing the pictures, predicting what might happen next, analysing the characters, exploring facts in a non-fiction book.
Please see the link below which takes you to the parent section of the Little Wandle website. This has useful videos showing how the sounds, blending and tricky words are taught.
https://www.littlewandlelettersandsounds.org.uk/resources/for-parents/
These websites offer lots of games to support our learning at school. They are fun, educational and free to use.
We like using
https://www.phonicsplay.co.uk/
Our reading books are changed on a Tuesday and Friday. Please comment in your child's reading record each time they read at home.
Teach Your Monster to Read is an app and online game to support early reading skills of segmenting and blending.
100 Recommended Reads in Key Stage 1
As well as phonics, we are learning cursive handwriting in Hedgehog Class and using this to write important words.
These are Year 1 and 2 Common Exception Words. Common exception words are words in which the English Spelling code works in an unusual or uncommon way. They are not words for which phonics 'doesn't work', but they may be exceptions to spelling rules, or words which use a particular combination of letters to represent sound patterns in a rare or unique way.
High Frequency sight words, are commonly used words that young children are encouraged to memorise as a whole by sight, so that they can automatically recognise these words in print without having to use any strategies to decode.
In Hedgehog Class, we use a variety of methods to support our learning. These range from using hands on resources, pictures and numbers. We like to have fun in our lessons and often use games to support our understanding.
Snacks
A healthy snack of fruit or vegetables is provided at break time each day. Milk can be ordered through http://www.coolmilk.com Please note that there is a charge for milk once your child turns 5.
Please bring in a bottle of water each day as learning is thirsty work!
- Plaxtol Primary School
- School Lane, Plaxtol, Sevenoaks, Kent
- England, TN15 0QD
- Tel: 01732 810200
- Email: office@plaxtol.kent.sch.uk