At St Joseph’s, we value the strong partnership we have with our parents/carers. We also value and place high importance on the support you give to your children. We have a range of ways in which we share and communicate teaching and learning information. Some of these are:
- Show and Share sessions where parents/carers are invited into school to join their child’s lessons.
- Parents’ Information Evenings: such as our reading and phonics information evenings, RSE information evenings and many more. We continually hold these across the year.
- Open classrooms where parents/carers are invited into their child’s classroom to see their learning environment and have a look at their work and tasks they have completed.
We encourage all parents/carers to speak with their child’s class teacher in the first instance for any general enquiries regarding teaching and learning, our curriculum or assessment.
Reading & Phonics Information Evenings
Our staff led two information evenings on reading and phonics to support our parents/carers in supporting their child with their learning. These information evenings took place on Tuesday 28th September and Tuesday 5th October. Thank you to all parents/carers that were able to attend. Please find the PowerPoint presentations that were shared via zoom during these evenings.
Reading Information Evening Presentation Phonics Information Evening PresentationWe have also put together resource packs to support you at home. Please find below a question guide for the assessment focuses to support reading comprehension skills: these can be used with all children. There is also a phonics guide that explains our SoundsWrite phonics programme as well as activity ideas and examples to support you to support your child at home: these can be used with children on their phonics learning journey.
Reading Comprehension AF Question Guide 100 Recommended Reads for FS2 – Y6 Phonics (SoundsWrite) Information and Activity IdeasFluency in Mathematics – Key Instant Recall Facts (KIRFs)
Key Instant Recall Facts (KIRFs) are designed to support the development of the mental skills and key knowledge that underpin much of the maths work in school. An important part of maths development has always been learning of certain maths facts. Each half term children focus on one area of Key Instant Recall Facts (KIRFs) that will be taught in school but also need to be practised at home.
It is important that children know these facts thoroughly and can recall them instantly. Whilst children have a wide range of abilities in mathematics, the KIRFs are designed to be a set of facts that need to be learnt thoroughly as they build on each other year on year.
Click the button to see the KIRFs for each year group. Whole School KIRF Targets
Please engage with your children in the learning of their KIRFs and make it as fun and practical as you can. Below you will find some ideas for activities that you could try at home. Children should aim to undertake KIRF practice regularly at home, little and often is the best approach.
Click the button for ideas you can try at home. There are examples for all year groups. KIRF activities for all year groups
What KIRFs look like in school:
- Nursery uses lots of practical equipment and things from outdoors to work on their number knowledge!
- Foundation stage works with many practical representations and especially loves the dinosaur matching activities!
- Year 1 works on various representations of arrays to find multiplication facts.
- Year 2 works on number bonds to 20 and they could find many ways to partition!
- Year 3 works well on their multiples and they are improving their speed of recall!
- Year 4 uses practical equipment like dominoes, cards or counters to quickly test each other on addition and subtraction facts. We also practise our times tables regularly!
- Year 5 enjoys the outdoor activities to recap on their learning and practise their factors, products and prime numbers.
- Year 6 gets active to practise their KIRFs outside!