Welcome to Class 1
Hello and welcome to all! Class 1 is a small, mixed-age group of Reception and Year 1 children. We have a very enthusiastic and dedicated teaching team. Our Class Teacher is Miss Small and our Learning Support Assistant is Mrs Cooper. We are fortunate to have a wonderful, spacious learning environment, consisting of a large classroom and two fantastic, adjoining outdoor areas. This free-flowing space enable us to carry out our learning and development through a playful, skills-based approach, drawing upon children’s own interests to learn creatively and curiously through play. It also successfully enables occasional, playfully structured learning experiences which ensure effective progression through the National Curriculum, for our Year 1 pupils.
In our classroom, we aim for all children to develop a love of learning, celebrating and supporting individual strengths and needs through continual adaptation of learning experiences, strategies and environments. In Class 1, we foster a skills-based approach throughout in order to focus on the development of children’s independence, collaboration, resilience, reflection and curiosity. Exercised using a combination of playful, structured and unstructured methods, we aspire to build firm foundations with which children will thrive, viewing all learning as valuable and all ‘mistakes’ as learning opportunities.
Class Teacher
Teaching Assistant
Our Learning
We use the children's interests, as well as topics and themes linked to the Year 1 Curriculum, to guide our learning experiences. This term, we have carried out an ‘all about me’ topic, exploring our appearance, likes, dislikes, families and emotions. We have also used the National Curriculum, science objective of ‘Seasonal Changes’ to explore the wonders of nature, focussing largely on changes to weather and physical aspects of trees during Autumn.
Phonics forms the foundation of our Early Years and Year 1 curriculum, focussed upon during daily, group sessions to rapidly enhance and progress children’s reading ability. We follow the Read, Write, Inc. phonics programme, aiming to instil confident reading skills alongside an ethos of reading for pleasure. We vote for a class read daily, whereby children are immersed with a wide range of fiction, non-fiction and poetry to increase interest and desire to read for themselves. We also introduce children to developing simple, yet vital, listening and speaking skills through the use of songs, rhymes, pictures and games. Each week, your child will bring home a phonics-focussed book, linking to the sounds taught that week, as well as a library book of their choice to share with you.