Year 1 - Willow Class

Our aim in Year 1 is to promote happy, confident and creative learners. We have a nurturing environment where all learners flourish and develop their independence and curiosity. We believe that learning through play should be an integral part of children’s transition into Year 1 and therefore, to ensure a smooth transition from the Early Years Foundation Stage, we have a unique Year 1 curriculum, whereby, children continue to have access to continuous provision across curriculum subjects. During this transition, children learn through a balance of independent continuous provision (supported by an adult), guided activities and focus groups.  

Alongside the daily teaching of phonics, all children are assigned a stage appropriate and fully decodable reading book: Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised Big Cat books.  These books are carefully matched, by class teachers, to prior phonic knowledge and skills, so that children can read ​fluently and independently​. Ongoing assessment ensures that children will be able to read 90% of assigned texts (9 out of 10 words) correctly, using their prior phonic knowledge enabling each child to see themselves as a successful reader, developing further confidence in their reading ability.  Each child reads the same book three times in school. Each read begins with a revisit and revise of previously taught Grapheme Phoneme Correspondences (GPCs) and words, including new vocabulary and tricky words appearing in the text, followed by sessions practicing decoding skills, prosody (intonation and expression) and comprehension skills.

In Year One, children are prepared for the Phonics Screening Check which is administered in the Summer term. Its sole purpose is to determine whether a child can phonically decode single words to an annually predetermined national standard.

In Writing, children are taught to apply taught phonic skills to write sentences, as well as use a large selection of high frequency words and adventurous topic based vocabulary. Children are encouraged to ‘have a go’ at spelling when writing independently, by segmenting (sounding out words phonetically) if they have not yet learned the correct spelling for a chosen word. Teachers will ask the children to use their ‘segmenting fingers’ and may ask the children to ‘write it like it sounds’ and, as they grow their phonics code, they will learn the correct graphemes to replace those guesses. During the teaching of writing the children will be encouraged to use capital letters, full stops, adjectives, and conjunctions whilst writing for a range of genres.

At Burton-on-the-Wolds we follow a Maths Mastery approach to our maths learning. We follow the White Rose scheme which ensures that children have regular opportunities to revisit and recall prior learning alongside acquiring new mathematical skills and knowledge through fluency, problem solving and reasoning. This means we focus on ensuring that all children have a solid, concrete understanding of subject knowledge and skills. We take learning at a steadier and deeper pace, ensuring that no child is left behind, as well as providing deeper and richer experiences for children who are working above the national expectation for their age. Children build upon their learning from Reception and can reason and problem solve with growing confidence. 

In Science, children begin to work scientifically, completing simple science experiments. They also widen their subject knowledge through discovering changes in the environment including; seasons, naming, describing and sorting materials, identifying different types of plants and naming and describing animals.

Children also experience wider curriculum subjects such as Music; where they perform as part of a group and learn to play un-tuned instruments, Geography; where they learn the continents of the world, Art; where they learn about different art movements and artists such as Andy Warhol and Henry Rousseau, History; where they study famous people of the past including Queen Victoria.

Through the in depth teaching of our PHSE (personal, health, social, education) curriculum, which we follow the Jigsaw scheme, we explore many topics including; feelings, behaviour, family structures, internet safety, disabilities.  Our children develop a respect for each other’s differences as they grow.  

Non-core subjects are taught weekly and link to our key questions where appropriate.  The knowledge and skills taught are defined in our progressive learning journeys which are used to plan lesson sequences and assess skills taught.  These are linked closely to the National Curriculum.  

Key Questions to drive learning and progress