Welcome to Year 1!

Notices

Class Christmas Parties – Thursday 18th December                                                            On Thursday 18th December, we are having our Christmas Parties. We have made a list of the things we need and you will find this on your Google Classroom strem so please sign up if you feel you can help with this. The food needs to come into school on the morning of the party. Please try and send this in with your children or hand it to the teacher at drop off (EY & KS1) rather than bringing it into the school office. If there are any questions please see class reps! Thank you for your help. Please check the food labels to ensure they do not contain nuts or sesame seeds.

Lunches Please can you make sure you have booked your child’s school lunches on MCAS. This also includes packed lunches.

Reading for Pleasure books Thank you to everyone who has been able to donate to our reading for pleasure book library. If you can donate a new Reading Pleasure book from our list below, it would be greatly appreciated. There are lots of new books added to the list for this year and as you can see we do not have many of these books.

Little Wandle Reading Books On Friday 26th September, we have sent home reading books with the children who had their wallets in school. Please make sure that your child’s reading wallet with reading record and book is returned to school on Thursday and we will send home on Friday.  If you would like your child to borrow a hard copy, we ask for a £8 deposit to be paid on MCAS. This includes £1 for a zippy wallet to protect the books, with the remaining £7 held to cover any lost or damaged books. Any leftover balance will be refunded when your child completes the Little Wandle program.

Celebrations In Year 1, we still enjoy teaching the children about important cultural and religious celebrations, particularly when they are significant to families in our class. In the past, we’ve really valued having parents come in to share their knowledge and experiences of special festivals and celebrations. If there are any of these that you are celebrating at home, it would be great if you could come in a share some information around this with your class. Please speak with your class teacher, if this is something you would like to do.

Key dates

Saturday 29th November 2025 – School Christmas Fair 11am-3pm

Wednesday 10th December 2025 – KS1 Panto – Sleeping Beauty – PM

Wednesday 17th December 2025 – Christmas Jumper Day

Wednesday 17th December 2025 – Ey/KS1 Carol Concert 9:30 @ Christ Church, Acton Green

Wednesday 17th December 2025 – Christmas Dinner

Thursday 18th December 2025 – Class Christmas parties PM (See food sign up sheet on Google Classroom)

Friday 19th December 2025 – Early finish @ 1:30pm for all pupils – Merry Christmas

Monday 5th January 2025 – Staff INSET Day – School closed to all pupils

Tuesday 6th January 2025 – Spring Term begins – Happy New Year

Autumn Topic 

Our topic this term is called ‘The Toy Trail’. In Geography, we will be learning about our local area and exploring different maps. In History, we will be learning about toys and games from our past.

Learning Trees

Y1 Autumn Learning Tree

Spellings

In Phonics, we have started to learn alternative graphemes (written sound) for digraphs learnt. Please practise reading and writing these in words below.

We have also learnt new tricky words (words that cannot be sounded out using phonics knowledge). Please practise reading and writing these:

Sentence dictation

For further spelling practise, dictate these sentences to your child. Remind them to use a capital letter and finger spaces.

My Maths Homework

Phonics screening check information for parents

Home School Partnership

Thank you to everyone who attended our Home School Partnership Evening. Please find a copy of the presentation below.

Home School Partnership 2025

Phonics Workshop

All information from the Phonics Workshop can be found on Google Classroom. Please follow the link below.

https://classroom.google.com/c/NzgwNjcyOTA3MDQ1/m/ODE1NjM1NjA3Mjk3/details

Phonics/Reading Books (eCollins) & Reading for Pleasure (Sharing Books)  

Daily Little Wandle phonics lessons continue in Year 1. In a similar way to Reception, phonics will be taught in groups by all Year 1 staff. Three times a week the children also read with an adult as part of a smaller group. These reading groups work on decoding, prosody and comprehension. At the end of every week, we will allocate this eBook to your child on the Collins website. New logins will be shared in your child’s reading record once they are ready. As in Reception, we will send physical books home if parents have signed the agreement to do so. Please return these books on a Thursday and they will be sent home on a Friday.

In addition to this, every Monday (starting 15^th September) your child will choose a sharing book and a library book. Please make sure book bags are in school on a Monday and we will return on a Tuesday. These books are recommended Year 1 texts – both fiction and non-fiction These are not designed to be at the child’s reading ability but please enjoy these together. They are labelled with a shiny Year 1 sticker. These books are returned and allocated every Monday.

We would like library and sharing books in every Monday. There is no need to bring these books on other days.

Reading for Pleasure

As part of our continued focus on reading in school, we would like to continue the lending library of books within each class. This will enable the children to foster a passion and love of reading at Belmont and ensure that they have access to high quality texts.
Please find links to the book list that has a variety of books that we would love to have in class.  Once a book has been donated to the class we will add a tick to show we now have it.  Please check the list to ensure that the book that you would like to donate is one that we don’t already have.
These books will be stamped to show who has generously donated them and shared with all the class. The books come from the Recommended Books for Year 1 List which can be found below.

Cherries List

Pears List

Click on the document below for some tips of reading with your children in Year 1.

Reading with your child KS1

Teachers:
Cherries – Miss Skinner
Pears– Miss Percival

Support Staff:
Cherries –  Ms Jay
Pears – Mrs Shrayev and Ms Jo

Class Reps

Our class reps are:

Cherries: TBC

Pears: TBC