Home Learning


One of our big drives over the last eighteen months has been to develop and improve home-school links, and to support that we've tried hard to provide more suggestions, resources and guidance to support home learning. Below you will find a list of school-wide approaches that we use (along with links to all the relevant sites and portals), while further down the page you will find class-specific information, linked to current topics and learning:

"Teachers and other adults have very positive relationships with pupils. As a result pupils work with confidence and commitment."

Ofsted report, 2022

Year 1
  • Explore some of our local habitats and see what different living things you can find there - what differences can you see between the park, woodland, back gardens and farmers fields? What things do the animals that live in these places eat? How do they keep themselves safe? Which of them would be happy living in your garden? 
  • Share stories, pictures, postcards and mementos from seaside trips in the past. What things did you do at the seaside? Why did you go to that particular place? If you’ve been to the seaside in different countries, think about what is similar and different about all these places.
Year 2
  • We're learning about division and fractions in maths, so try sharing out food together - can we split this cake into thirds or find half of these sweets? Try different ways of sharing - cutting into portions, counting out an equal number for each person or splitting things into groups - which method makes the most sense for whatever you’re trying to do?
  • Explore some of our local habitats and see what different living things you can find there - what differences can you see between the park, woodland, back gardens and farmers fields? What things do the animals that live in these places eat? How do they keep themselves safe? Which of them would be happy living in your garden? There are some great BBC Bitesize resources to support our habitat topic available here.
Years 3 and 4
  • Each week we are set spellings to learn. Click here for guidance on strategies you can use to support your child in learning these at home. 
  • You can have a go at coding in Scratch by heading to scratch.mit.edu or downloading the Scratch app. There are loads and loads of tutorials, ideas and examples of other people’s work available on the Scratch site.
  • To support our science topic, Investigate what magnets stick to - fridge magnets work fine, and you can investigate lots of different materials around the house. Try different metals and help your child discover that magnets only stick to some of them (mostly iron and steel).
  • Maths homework goes home every Thursday. Your child should be familiar with the content from class, but encourage them to talk about what they’re doing and how the strategy works. 
  • Start learning times tables facts - in Year 3, 2x, 10x, 5x and then 3x tables would be a great place to start. In Year 4, we're aiming to know all our facts by heart by the end of the year. 
  • We’re learning about water in Geography. We're disappointingly short on big rivers in our part of Hertfordshire, so if the opportunity arrives for a visit to an interesting lake or riverside (on the way back from a day out or just for a Sunday afternoon walk), that’d be great - we’d love to hear about it (and share some photos) in class. 
Years 5 and 6
  • All of the maths we’re doing this term is dependent on quick recall of tables facts, so it would be brilliant if you could work on this. Focus on one table at a time and try: 
    • Making-up rhymes to help remember number facts (“4 x 6 is 24, bears growl and lions roar!”) 
    • Looking for numbers in that table in the world around you - on doors, car number plates, in phone numbers or when you’re out shopping. 
    • Writing-out tables with finger paints, chalk or water-on-tarmac, or make them from playdoh. 
    • Chanting, singing, whispering... Say tables out loud together whenever you have the chance.
  • Each week we are set spellings to learn. Click here for guidance on strategies you can use to support your child in learning these at home. 
  • To learn more about the Mayans, have a look at the BBC Bitesize resources at: www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/topics/zq6svcw This includes really quick video clips that explain who the Mayans were and where they came from, and will give us a good head-start in lessons.
  • To support our work on life cycles in science, look for examples of living things growing and changing all around us - in the garden, can you spot plants sprouting and growing their first leaves? In the trees and bushes around us, can you spot chicks being fed and starting to grow? Check in with the ducks in the park - over a few weeks, how do the ducklings change and grow, becoming more independent and getting ready to fly...