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/jointhemovement  
• 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.   

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.