Year One | St Teresa's R.C. Primary School

The Year One team consists of Mrs Dagens, Mrs Jones, Mrs Harrison, and Mrs Duffy (and the children of course!).

On a typical day, we start with guided reading. While one group reads with Mrs Dagens/Mrs Jones, another will read with Mrs Harrison and the rest of the class work independently on a range of phonics, handwriting or reading activities. After that, we take an English lesson, where we explore different stories, texts and poetry and try our own hand at writing. It can be a lot of fun!

During break time, we have a good chance to run around, play with our friends and have a drink and a snack - very important if we want to concentrate during lesson time.

After break, we focus on our mathematics skills, such as counting and recognising number facts. Then, before lunch, we have our Letters and Sounds session where we use our phonics skills. It's very important to know the building blocks of English if we are going to become excellent readers and writers!

For lunch, we sit with our friends and either enjoy the food prepared by the lunchtime staff or our own packed lunch. We also play out and make use of the school equipment.

After lunch, every day takes a different path, learning about Jesus through RE, art, history, science, PE and many other wonderful things.

At the end of the day, if there is time, we will do Show and Tell or listen to a story. We're pretty tired by then, so it's nice to see mums or dads and go home for our dinner.

LettersandsoundsPPpresentationforparents 2016.ppt

Sound Mats

Here are the sound mats which are used by the children to support them with their spelling in class.

Phonic Screening Check words

PHONIC SCREENING CHECK words.pdf

Phonics Video (password 'strcps')

Children take daily phonics classes at St. Teresa's RC Primary School throughout the Foundation Stage and KS1. During this time they learn to recognise the letters and groups of letters (graphemes) that represent the different sounds in English (phonemes).

All the time, they learn to blend - or synthesise - the sounds that the letters make to read words (decoding) and write what they hear to spell (encoding).

This approach is proven to accelerate the process of learning to read, although must also be used in conjunction with other skills such as sight reading, reading for meaning and understanding English grammar.

This video can be used daily by your child. It mirrors part of the phonics lessons that they receive in school, in particular a game called 'Speedy Sounds' in which they are asked to quickly recognise and pronounce various graphemes.

The graphemes 'a-e', 'e-e', 'i-e', 'o-e' and 'u-e' represent the long vowel sounds in words such as 'make', 'bike' and 'dune' and are called 'split digraphs'.