Ukranian Divine Litergy

We have recently been made aware that St Anselm’s RC Church,  9 Tooting Bec Road, London,SW17 8BS (email: tootingbec@rcaos.org.uk )

Tooting Bec, hold a Ukranian Divine Litergy  at 1.30pm each Sunday.  This is followed by further familiy activities.

If you are interested in attending, please just turn up and you will be welcome to take part.

 

Crackers of Kindness Appeal

Please see our slideshow from the Crackers of Kindness appeal The Faith Team had a wonderful time singing for the residents of a local Care Home.  Giving out the crackers and chatting to the residents – bringing such cheer to them all.  As you can see it was a lovely day all round.  Thank you to Mrs Eaden for organising this event and all the children who took part.

We would also like to thank the parents and children who made the crackers to enable our Faith Team to brighten so many people’s Advent.

St Teresa’s Faith Team

We are delighted to share with you the new faith team for 2021.22.

Continuing from last year:  Giovanna & Sarah from 6W  & Luis – from 6F
Maddison;  Lena K; Robin; Olivia; Eldana from 5D

See a picture of the team IMG_1123.JPG _ DocHub

Maya in Year 1’s quest to save Africa’s Big ‘3’

Maya was so moved by the reading book she borrowed from class that she became passionate about endangered wild life. Her class teacher spoke to her Mum and encouraged her to make a video to raise awareness. They went even further!

Maya made a very articulate video about the issue and pledged to learn all her tricky word spellings in return for sponsorship. Please see Maya’s video here

If anyone would like to donate please do so via her Just Giving page.  Details are in the video.

St Teresa’s are proud of Maya’s determination and enthusiam to raise funds for this wonderful cause.

Well done Maya.

Year 3’s Roman Day

It seems a while ago now but Year 3 enjoyed a great day learning about Romans and dressing up in their wonderful outfits!  The photos below give a great example of how involved they were and the benefits of their experience!  Dressing the part always helps to give them that extra bit of enthusiasm plus having a visitor to the school to enlarge on their topic.  We wanted to share some of their beautiful photos with you.

Spelling, Grammar & Punctuation

Grammar and Punctuation

A clear progression of Spelling, Punctuation and Grammar skills/objectives is outlined in each year group’s English Medium Term Plan. Aspects of grammar and punctuation will be taught in weekly skills lessons. However, at St Teresa’s we recognise that grammar is best taught in the context of real reading and writing activities, rather than through isolated exercises; therefore, some units of work from the Literacy Tree Scheme will incorporate elements of grammar through the study of a key text. 

Grammar, Punctuation and Vocabulary Overview

 

 

Phonics

Phonics

Our ultimate aim in the teaching of early reading is for children to leave Year 2 fluent, confident and independent readers being able to apply their knowledge and skills across the curriculum. We place a great deal of importance and emphasis on the teaching of early reading.

Phonics is an integral part of early reading and writing. Phonics is developed for early readers to enable them to become skilled at thinking about and manipulating sounds in words; over time this enables them to become skilled at decoding unfamiliar words to read and encoding words in order to write. With these key skills, children are in an excellent position to access the wider curriculum. Teachers give children sufficient opportunity in reading books that  are closely matched to the phonics programme, both at school and at home. The love and enjoyment for reading is reinforced in the rich, broad diet of texts to excite and challenge.

‘Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised’ is the systematic synthetic phonics program that St Teresa’s has adopted to support our teaching of phonics across the school.  All pupils in Early Years Foundation Stage and Key Stage One participate in daily phonics lessons which are led by trained members of staff. The ongoing assessment of pupils’ phonics progress is sufficiently frequent and detailed to identify any pupil who is falling behind the program’s pace. If they do fall behind, targeted support is given immediately. Children in KS2 who have not achieved the required standard in phonics also receive daily interventions.

Phonics and Early Reading Policy (from March 2022) 

Parental Support 

Click on the link to watch a video supporting the teaching of phonics sounds 

Writing

Writing

How we teach writing at St Teresa’s 

At St Teresa’s RC Primary we view the acquisition of language skills to be of the utmost importance and so the teaching of all aspects of English is given high priority. Writing is integral to our children’s whole language experience; it is a crucial part of thinking and learning. We aim to teach different genres of writing by using a wide range of high quality text (selected from the Power of Reading and Literacy Tree Schemes). Children will engage with quality authors to motivate their learning and deepen their knowledge of texts. This will, in turn, provide a meaningful context for writing.

In our teaching of writing, we aim for all children to:

  • Appreciate that writing is a universal method of communication
  • View writing as a process over which they have control
  • Enjoy playing with language and write for pleasure
  • Write appropriately for specific real or imaginary audiences
  • Write for a variety of purposes
  • Make judgements about the tone, style, format and vocabulary appropriate to the writing’s purpose, audience and genre
  • Write clearly legibly and accurately with attention to punctuation, spelling and grammar
  • Recognise that drafting, incorporating significant revision into their writing and proof-reading are integral parts of the writing process
  • Achieve independent writing of high quality

The Writing Process and Purpose

Children will be taught strategies and tools for the various components of the Writing Process such as planning, drafting, sharing, evaluating, revising and editing, summarising and sentence combining.

The Writing Process will consist of four key areas:

SECURING SUBJECT MATTER – children will become experts in the field so they are confident about what to write. Teachers will engage children in pre-writing activities where they can assess what they already know, research and unfamiliar topic or arrange their ideas visually. They will use a combination of techniques to develop expertise. This will help unlock creativity and bring learning alive.

IMITATION & Immersion – Teachers will use a strong, quality shared text (selected from the Power of Reading and Literacy Tree Scheme) as a model from which children internalise the key language features.

INNOVATION – Use the structure and language patterns of the model text for shared planning and writing in a new, but closely related, context

INDEPENDENT APPLICATION – children will be guided to choose and use suitable writing strategies as well as encouraged to be flexible when using the different writing components. 

Children will also be taught to adopt VCOP when editing and improving their writing.

V – Vocabulary      C – Conjunctions       O – Openers       P – Punctuation

Children will be taught to write for different purposes e.g. ‘describe’; ‘narrate’; ‘inform’; ‘persuade’; ‘analyse’. Their conception of what is ‘audience’ will be developed with models of good writing.

 

Handwriting

As a school our aims in teaching handwriting are that the pupils will:

  • Experience coherence and continuity throughout our School to write legibly in a joined style with increasing fluency as soon as they are able.
  • Understand the importance of clear and neat presentation in order to communicate meaning clearly
  • Take pride in the presentation of their work 
  • Development of handwriting to be linked to grapheme-phoneme correspondence
  • Be able to write quickly to aid expressing themselves creatively and imaginatively across the curriculum and for a range of purposes.

In order to achieve the above aims children must develop:

  • A correct pencil grip
  • The ability to form all letters and joins correctly
  • Knowledge in regard to the relationship between size and orientation of letter

Handwriting will change over time and children will develop a personal style. From an early stage, pupils will understand the importance of neat presentation and the need for different letterforms (cursive, printed or capital letters) to help communicate meaning clearly

Correct posture and pencil for handwriting

Handwriting letter formation display

Number formation display

 

Reading

“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.” ― Dr. Seuss

At St Teresa’s we provide opportunities for children to explore a diverse range of fiction, non-fiction and poetry. These books are carefully chosen to develop pupils’ vocabulary, language, comprehension and love of reading. We develop word reading  and comprehension through the use of cross curricular themes, story-times, whole class, guided or independent reading. We believe children’s love of literature comes from taking every opportunity to expose them to high quality texts for both the purposes of fact finding and enjoyment. 

By the time pupils leave the school, they are competent readers, who can recommend books to their peers, have a thirst for reading a range of genres and text types, including poetry and participate in discussions about books.

Recommended reading list

Year 1 reading list

Year 2 reading list

Year 3 reading list

Year 4 reading list

Year 5 reading list

Year 6 reading list

Developing reading skills

To be skilled as a reader, it is more than just accurate reading. What is meant and understood can be developed by focussing on these 7 areas. These skills can be shown through the texts, which children read independently but also shown in texts that they have listened to in class:

1. DECODE ACCURATELY  Getting the words off the page 

Use of phonics, sight recognition, context, picture clues

2.RETRIEVAL  Seek, find, understand 

Literal responses to text 

Finding the right parts of the text to answer questions

3.INFERENCE AND DEDUCTION Reading between the lines 

What is meant but not said 

Interpret meaning from what is in the text 

Put yourself in their shoes

4.UNDERSTANDING STRUCTURE Organisation 

Commenting on presentational features 

Why is the text presented and organised as it is

5.USE OF LANGUAGE Use of Language 

Why the writer selects a word / phrase / image / sentence 

Effect of different techniques 

Impact on reader

6.AUTHOR’S INTENT Writer’s purpose 

How did the author want you to think/feel/respond 

Writer’s attitudes and values 

Impact on reader

7.TEXTS AND THE WORLD How the text fits into its context 

Understanding the social, historical, cultural, literary heritage Links with other texts

Celebrating Books

WORLD BOOK DAY 2021

The theme for World Book Day 2021 was Masked Reader. Children chose a character from their favourite book and created a mask. We launched the week with a series of masked readers and children had to guess the staff and their favourite book. This was a huge success and engaged children in conversations about a range of books. 

Can you guess our masked reader? 

Masked reader 1 The Tiger

Masked reader 2 The Dragon

Masked reader 3 DJ Marshmello

Masked reader 4 The First Fox 

Masked reader 5 The Second Fox

The Reveal 

St Teresa’s Best Mask Winners

 

Year 1’s first day back at school

We just wanted to share a few photographs of the Year 1 children, who had a great day back at school.  The children were really positive and eager to learn.

Click  to see the Year 1’s in action  here

Our NED Learning Mantra!

Our learning mantra of Never give up, Encourage others and Do your best (NED) is fundamental to what we do in school (before lockdown) and we celebrate special achievements in NED assembly once a week, where the winners were having a tea party with the Headteacher, getting hot chocolate and biscuit.  However, during the pandemic, we have had to give the children a little bag with an individual hot chocolate and a small treat, instead, which is either posted out or handed to them if they are a key-worker’s child, in school.    

We look forward to using the St Teresa’s NED mugs again in the near future,  for our tea parties. These came from Gracie, Giovanna and Manuela, who donated some of their birthday money to pay for them!  

Acts of random kindness like these, are such a great feature of our school.  Thank you so much.

 

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