Supporting Your Child At Home

School and home working in partnership is the best way to achieve the most for all of our children.
 
Each class and teacher has their own schedule of regular homework and activities that they ask you to help and support your child with at home.  If you are unsure about any of these contact your child's class teacher and they will be able to help you.
 
It is vitally important that any structured learning you do with your child at home does not become a battle.  That is not good for anyone.  If you are having problems getting your child to engage with homework, for whatever reason, please come and talk with your child's teacher.  We can help find ways to ease the tension, and ensure that learning both in and out of school is positive for your child.
 
Below are ideas for more general learning activities that you might want to undertake with your child at home.  These are supplementary to their usual homework activities.  But might be useful during weekends or holidays, or if your child has been off school unwell but is starting to feel better.
 
Reading
Any and all reading that you can do with your child at home is beneficial.  This can be school books, or books from home or the library, or newspapers or magazines.  All reading is good.  It is important to discuss the content of what your child has read, as well as them just reading the words.  Can they: recall what has happened; predict what might happen next; describe settings and characters; explain how characters are feeling or have behaved, giving reasons why; recall facts from an information text.  Comprehension skills are vital at all stages of learning to read.
 
Spellings
Most children across the school have weekly spellings to learn.  Practising these is always a good use of time.  If for some reason children do not have particular words to learn one week, take the opportunity to go back and re-visit words from previous weeks.  It is surprising how quickly these can be forgotten!
 
Writing
Any writing you can do at home is helpful for your child.  Whether it is writing a story, re-telling a story they know, recounting something they have done, writing facts about a subject that interests them, a letter to a friend or relative, or even a shopping list, they all help them practice vital skills.
 
Maths
Children always have number bonds or times table facts to learn as part of the 99 Club challenge that we run across the school every week.  Being able to quickly recall number facts is incredibly important for children's overall learning and progress in maths.  Each child also has a Maths Passport which details everything they need to master across the whole of the broad maths curriculum.  Anything you can do to help them learn or practice these skills and understanding is also beneficial.
 
Other Subjects
Each class sends out a Curriculum Overview Grid each half term which details the learning that will be taking place across all subjects.  Any extra research children can do to support the topics they are learning about in school, is useful and interesting for them.  They may just want to learn facts, or they may want to display what they have found out in some way such as a picture, a poster, a powerpoint presentation, a written report, or a leaflet.  We would love for children to share any work they complete like this with us in school.
 
On-line Games
The internet now provides a wealth of interactive games through which children can learn and practice knowledge and skills that will support our work in school.  Here are just a few examples of sites you can try:
https://www.phonicsplay.co.uk - games to support the learning of letters and sounds for EYFS and KS1.
https://www.topmarks.co.uk - this site has a number of maths and English games organised by Year group.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/websites/4_11/ - this site has games, quizzes and information for all areas of the curriculum.