Otley and Witnesham Partnership

Welcome to Class 1! Mrs Rookyard is our class teacher and Mrs Balding and Mrs Liddell are our fantastic TAs. Mrs Cosgrove teaches Class 1 on Tuesday mornings and Mrs Engels teaches for some of Thursday afternoons.

Class 1 is a fun, supportive place to learn, where we develop our confidence, independence, curiosity and creativity! 

How we learn
In Year R, we follow the Early Years curriculum which is very active and play based. The adults observe our play and develop our learning. They also encourage us to try new activities and increase our skills! We have daily Phonics lessons, as well as daily ‘Funky Fingers’ sessions to develop our arm, hand and finger muscles, ready for writing. We have two group reading sessions each week, where we work on our decoding, fluency and comprehension. We use Drawing Club for our Writing lessons, where we use our imagination to draw pictures inspired by books and then use our phonics skills to label and describe them. We also have a mixture of Maths lessons and ‘Project Time’ sessions throughout the week. 

In Year 1 and 2, we begin the day with a Phonics session. We learn new graphemes and phonemes and practise reading ‘tricky’ words that are not decodable. We have four Reading, four Writing and four Maths sessions per week. In these lessons, we use a mixture of whole class input, group work with an adult and independent work. There are always resources available to help us with our learning and we make learning prompts to display on our Working Walls. We use Continuous Provision to challenge ourselves and consolidate our learning. This encourages us to think creatively and really enjoy our learning!

We cover all of the wider curriculum subjects every afternoon. These sessions usually involve a whole class input followed by an independent challenge for us to complete. We love to use books to inspire our learning, and we use many practical resources to support our understanding of key concepts. 

We use Seesaw in lessons to record our practical learning, for example in Maths lessons. We can also record our independent learning from Discovery Time on Seesaw.

Please see the curriculum part of our website to find out more about the topics we will be focusing on!

Communication

At Otley Primary School, we believe in the importance of effective communication between home and school. Families are encouraged to communicate with teachers in person at the beginning and end of the day, or via messages on Class Dojo. There are a variety of parent workshops, meetings, assemblies and Stay and Plays sessions throughout the year. Look out on the newsletters for the dates of these sessions.

Homework

All children will receive a phonics home learning sheet each week. This will keep you updated on your child’s phonics learning, and provide some activities to complete at home.
Reading is very important to us in Class 1! The children will have a reading diary, reading book and a reading for pleasure book (Library book) in their reading pack. The children will read with an adult twice a week in reading groups. Children will receive 1 Dojo point each time they read at home.

Other Notices

Children in Class 1 will be using their outdoor space in all weathers, please help your child to remember their hat/scarves/gloves! 

Our PE day is Thursday and our library day is Monday.

Please make sure that all items (bags, bottles, jumpers…) are named, so that we can easily reunite any missing items with their owners!