English

Speaking and Listening

Students will participate in oral presentations during Show and Share sessions, developing their confidence in speaking to the whole class. They will be encouraged to communicate clearly, listen attentively to others and take turns when contributing to conversations and discussions with partners, small groups and the class.

As part of our Inquiry into animals and their survival needs, students will share their knowledge of a chosen animal and present information about its habitat to the class. During these presentations, students will be encouraged to ask questions, listen respectfully and provide constructive feedback to their peers.

Writing 

This term, students will continue to develop their writing skills, with a focus on using capital letters and full stops correctly in sentences. They will be encouraged to leave appropriate spaces between words and reread their writing to check that it makes sense. Students will also be introduced to adjectives to describe the features and characteristics of different animals and will be encouraged to incorporate descriptive language into their writing.

Our writing focus will include recounts and the creation of short texts to explore and record ideas and events. Students will also practise writing reports, retelling stories, improvising on familiar texts and experimenting with transactional writing through activities such as writing letters to Santa.

Students will continue to participate in formal handwriting sessions to practise and consolidate correct letter formation, with an emphasis on using the correct entry and exit points. They will also continue to develop consistency in letter size and placement, ensuring letters sit correctly on the dotted thirds.

Reading 

Students will continue to participate in guided reading sessions, where they will receive explicit instruction and support to develop and consolidate their decoding and comprehension strategies. They will explore and apply a range of reading strategies, using their growing phonemic knowledge to decode unfamiliar words. A continued focus will be placed on developing reading fluency, including attending to punctuation, reading with expression and self-correcting when necessary.

To support our inquiry learning this term, students will explore non-fiction texts and develop an understanding of their features. They will learn how to use factual texts to locate relevant information, identify key details and discuss the main ideas presented in a text.

Daily phonics sessions will continue to reinforce letter blends and digraphs, with a new focus on the FLOSS rule, Gentle Cindy, vowel teams  and suffixes such as -s and -ing. Students will also explore syllables and rhyming words to further strengthen their phonological awareness and support their developing reading and spelling skills.