Lots of parents and carers often ask teachers how to help their children with their learning at home. There are some key things that can impact greatly and have been listed below for you.

Reading

1. Encouraging your children to bring home their reading book and diary. Please, contact the teacher if you haven’t seen your child with their book for a while.

2. Asking your children to read every day at home for at least 20-30 minutes, preferably with an adult or older sibling.

3. Try to model the reading of paragraphs or sentences in the children’s books to show fluency, expression and intonation. Ask the children to repeat after you have modelled.

4. Ask questions about what the children have read. Please click on the document link below for ideas.

5. Asking the children to read newspapers, signs, comics, etc to encourage greater word recognition and understanding.

6. Take an interest in their reading age and how many quizzes on Accelerated Reader have been completed per week. A minimum of one quiz per week is expected. Can the children tell you when their last quiz was and their score?

Spelling

Spelling rules are taught at school along with a list of Common Exception Words (CEW). We also send home weekly differentiated spelling lists for the children to revise. If the children could be encouraged to learn these spellings, then that would be very helpful indeed. Spelling Shed, where the children can play spelling games online, is also a great way to learn too.

Please see the attached documents for ideas on ways to learn and improve spelling knowledge.

Times Tables

By the end of Year Four, children are expected to have instant recall of multiplications up to 12. It is therefore important that the times tables are regularly rehearsed at home and at school, so that the knowledge is retained. Chanting, quickfire questions, multiplication songs and encouraging your children to log into Times Table Rock Stars is a great way to help them with this. Even a small amount of time each day can make a difference.

Time telling

Being able to tell the time is a very important life skill and whilst we do cover this in school, the more time telling that they can do, the easier it will be. Use of a twelve hour analogue clock or watch, regularly asking the children to tell you the time, asking them to change from analogue to digital and then to 24 hour time would be greatly beneficial to their overall understanding.

Calculations

Being able to find answers to the four operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication and division) using a written method is particularly important. Any support that could be given on this would be very helpful. Find out more about the calculations that we use by clicking on the attached documents.