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:

• Children in Nursery, Reception, Year 1 and Year 2 all have daily phonics sessions. We follow the ReadWriteInc scheme, and they have lots of guidance on how you can support your child with phonics at home here.  
• Nursery and Reception use Tapestry to share work that children have done in school and share ideas for learning beyond school. Again, speak to your child's teacher if you're not sure about how to log in. 
• Children in Years 2-6 bring home weekly spellings to learn - these are drawn from a combination of spelling patterns that children are working on in class and common exception words (which do not fit regular patterns) for their age group. Click here for guidance on useful strategies you can use to support your child in learning their spellings.  
• Keeping fit, happy and healthy is always important. There are links to lots of great resources and workouts to help everyone in the family get active at www.sportengland.org/get-moving
• Finally, one of the simplest and most powerful ways you can support your child's learning every day is by hearing them read and reading to them. Our guide on how to make the most of this is available here.   

Years 1 and 2

• Keep on practicing counting whenever and wherever you can - how many cars are there in the street? How many trees in the field? How many trollies in the supermarket, players on the team or stairs on the way to bed? Our focus is on numbers from 10-20 this term, so things that come in groups of this size are ideal for counting practice. 
• The core learning in our next history topic is about recognising the difference between ‘old’ and ‘new’ things and understanding that things change over time - so any discussions that link to this would be really useful. What things in your area have changed over the last few years? Did the toys that your children play with exist when you were a child? What different things did you do when you were their age?
• Throughout the year we are exploring how our environment changes with the seasons. You could build on this at home in lots of ways - exploring the park, making maps or looking for signs of autumn and winter on the way to and from school. What do we do differently as the weather gets colder? What do animals do to prepare for the colder months ahead?
  
• Go on a materials hunt in the park, garden or local woodland, collecting twigs, leaves, conkers and other natural resources, and then see what artwork you can create from them.
• Practice reciting the days of the week and months of the year in order - saying them is great; learning to spell a few of them would be even better! 

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. 
• Keep 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 volcanoes, earthquakes, floods and hurricanes, so if anyone in the family has first-hand experiences of these (that aren’t too scary), they would be great to share. Otherwise, see what you can find out about one of these natural disasters - the BBC Bitesize site has some great videos and animations here. 
• If you’re visiting London anytime soon, the Natural History Museum has a whole section devoted to volcanoes and earthquakes - you can find out more about visiting at www.nhm.ac.uk
• Explore sounds you can make around the house by tapping bottles, table tops or toys. What links are there between the material and the sound produced? Try making a cup and string telephone, and talk about how the sound is being transmitted - there are instructions at https://www.sciencekids.co.nz/projects/stringphone.html
• There’s some great advice on talking to children about online safety on the NSPCC website at www.nspcc.org.uk/ keeping-children-safe/ We also use lots of resources from the UK Safer Internet Centre: saferinternet.org.uk/