Homework at St Louis Catholic Primary School
At St Louis Catholic Primary School the children are expected to work hard in their lesson time and when they leave for home it is a time for a different type of learning through play or an organised activity or even just relaxing. Research clearly suggests that homework has little impact on learning for children at Primary School age, so our reasons for setting the homework that we do, is a mixture of enjoyment, setting good habits for the future and giving children the opportunity to be responsible for being in charge of their own learning.
Reading at St Louis Catholic Primary School
We at St Louis believe in reading for enjoyment with all aspects of reading being an important part of our school life leading to the children being independent and high attaining readers at the end of their time at St Louis. With this in mind, we encourage the children to continue their journey at home by reading a range of age-appropriate books.
All children are motivated through regular reading challenges and events and their engagement and effort is recognised with certificates at reading milestones. We ask parents to share our commitment by providing reading opportunities for their children at home. In partnership with parents, we are able to provide the children with a strong foundation that enables them to reach the end of key stage 2 expectation of reading an age-appropriate novel independently.
Reading at Home
In Key Stage 1, children will bring home a RWI book, a RWI book bag book that are closely matched to their phonic ability as well as a library book. Children have individual reading records that are kept in class to track their reading progress. In Key Stage 2, children have a reading journal to record each book they read. In class, they have regular opportunities to talk about and share the books they have read.
We encourage parents to support their child's enjoyment of reading through regular opportunities to read together, with children sharing their school reading books and adults reading high quality texts to them. If you would like some inspiration of what texts might be suitable, please follow the links to some websites that may help:
Please also follow the links below for our guide to helping your child read at home and our reading at home bookmark prompts.
At the beginning of each term, the children receive an overview with the weekly spellings linked to the rules they will be learning in class. We ask that parents to help their child to practise these spellings at home, a range of ideas can be found in our Helping Your Child with Spelling booklet.
Reception and Year 1 will be given sounds, key words and red words linked to their phonic learning. These will be added to their phonics booklet each week. As the year progresses Year 1 will also receive key words linked to the class spelling rule.
We monitor the children’s progress with short short spelling tests/quizzes.
(Reception & Year 1 work on Phonics, rather than spellings, throughout the year.)
Times Tables Rock Stars and NumBots
To support their maths learning the children also have the option of using Numbots (Reception and KS1) and Times Tables Rock Stars (KS2) independently and exploring the wide range of games and challenges that are available to them.
At the beginning of each term, the class teacher selects appropriate activities that build on the learning in class.
Helping your child at home
Please find below some links that may help you in supporting your child with their homework: