At our Pupil Progress Meetings this week, we have been distributing an information sheet containing whole school updates on our recent focuses for learning.

For those parents who were unable to attend, you can view this here.

If you have any questions, please do speak to your child's class teacher.

Whole School Updates

Dear Parents and Carers,

Thank you for coming to our Pupil Progress meetings. This leaflet contains information about some of the things we will be working to improve as a school over the next term.

School Values

After the Easter holiday, we will be working on exploring the school values in depth with the children. We hope this will give them a clearer understanding of why they are earning their reward certificates. Alongside this, we will be focussing on our behaviour curriculum, and modelling how our school values and positive behaviour go hand in hand together

Spelling Update for parents

This half term we have had a big focus on spelling in school. Every child from Year 2-6 has had the opportunity to practise spellings in preparation for our spelling bee competition.

Over the next nine weeks, we will be introducing a tool to identify which spelling rules children are finding challenging and teaching these directly in class. There will also be a stronger focus on children identifying words which follow the spelling rules in their written work.   The scheme will help children to understand spelling rather than just learning lists of words.  It prompts them to notice the features of words and pay attention to how words are made up – the letter patterns, root words, prefixes, suffixes, rules.

Every few weeks, we will be introducing hot spellings to the children; these are words which we would like them to try and use correctly in all of their writing.  This will be happening in Years R-6.

Kinetic Letters

We have progressed further in our introduction of the Kinetic Letters handwriting scheme.

Every year group has learnt the formation of the letters in the writing families.

The letters are in families based on how they are formed from their starting positions.

The children have learnt how to snuggle the letters (keep them close).

Some year groups have been practising joining letters together.

The families:

jumper (all start with a down bump movement) h n r m b p

abracadabra (all start with a pull back - just like the letter c) c a d g o q s

window cleaner (all start down) u l i t

squirter (starts in the middle and moves out) e

slider (slides down) w x z v k

fisher (hook down) j f y

Maths mastery

We are continuing to implement the Maths Mastery approach.   The children are exploring skills such as 'describing' 'proving' 'explaining' and 'reasoning' to demonstrate their mathematical thinking.

An important part of this approach is that the children have a clear mental image of what they are doing in maths. They develop this through the use of concrete objects and materials such as Unifix Cubes and Numicon. We have been investing in these resources to make sure that we have lots to use in every maths lesson.