We will begin our new year together by discovering more about our class artist - Stephen Wiltshire.  Together, we will research key facts about his life and his talents so that we can create biographies of his life. 

We will then move on to explore 'The Tree - An Environmental Fable' by Neal Layton. 

This simple but rich text will encourage us to debate our impact on the environment, as well as providing opportunities for writing through reports about wildlife as well as rewriting the text for different audiences. 

We will continue to use Language Through Colour prompts and strategies to support reading comprehension and writing strategies.  During English lessons we will also work on building knowledge and understanding of some of the vocabulary that the children will come across in their topics in their mainstream classes.  We will continue to use the Sound and Meaning Cue Card to support the connections that pupils build about language they are learning.   

As well as the reading that we do in English lessons, we aim to ensure that all SRP pupils read daily in school to an SRP adult.  We use these focussed blocks of time to work on phonic sounds and strategies for decoding, as well as on helping the children to build their fluency in reading.  We use VIPERS question stems to structure our questioning.  

Please ensure that you hear your child read regularly at home too, the more practise they get of this tricky skill, the better they will become and the easier they will find it. 

Their other motivation for reading at home, of course, is the earning of Dojos which count towards their personal and mainstream class totals!