How to help at home
Reading
The ability to read is fundamental for children to access the curriculum and to be able step into the world of literature and immerse themselves in books. Reading to and hearing your child read daily is the best way to help them to develop the ability to read and a love of books. We know that finding the right book can be challenging and whilst there is nothing wrong with reading a series of books it is best to read a range of authors and genres. We have found the website Books for Topics a great resource for staff and families and we also use the Pie Corbett Reading Spine to select class texts from. When reading to or hearing read discuss the story, look at challenging words and see if your child can give you an explanation for the word without using it or find a synonym. We are having a big push on vocabulary and oracy across the school and are part of a project across the Torridge region. Research has shown that children with word rich diets who have multiple conversations are more likely to have better mental health and be employed then those with word poor diets. Discovering, understanding and then using new words in conversations and when writing has been shown to be a key part in helping children make excellent progress
The 50 recommended reads for each year group can be found below.
Maths
There are a number of good websites and documents to help support your child with developing their fluency with maths. The materials from White Rose Maths are a great start to understand teaching and supporting your child with the Concrete, Pictoral and Abstract method. Learning is introduced by using concrete resources such as numicon, diennes, place value counters. Then alongside this the children will draw these concrete resources e.g. representing the tens by a line and ones [what were 'units'] by a dot or circle. From this the children will be taught the written column methods with a secure understanding of the mathematical reasoning behind it. We use bar modelling to help the children to visualise the problem that they are trying to solve and to help them to reason what operation[s] they need to use to calculate the answer. White Rose Maths has a whole month of Barvember problems that can be used for all primary pupils - the 'Challenge' questions are very challenging!
To support the development of fluency we buy into Times Table Rock Stars and children have an account from Y3 upwards. Other ways to support are to count on and backwards, counting in 10s on and back from any given number, working on times tables [2, 5, 10, 3, 4, 6, 8, 9, 7] and discussing the maths around you e.g. shopping and money, telling the time, days of the week and months of the year etc.
NRICH has a great range of puzzles and promblems that will challenge the earliest to older mathematicians.