12th November 2019Mrs K Shutler

There are many things that parents can do at home to support their children but it is important to find a balance between school learning and extra work at home. The school day is very busy and some children are genuinely tired at the end of a week at school.

The best thing that you can do is to involve your child in ‘real life’ activities – talk to them about what you are doing and ask them to help you. However, we do recognise that some parents are keen to support their child’s learning at home so we have put together a list of ideas and links to websites which may help you to achieve this.

  1. Establish routines for regular practise of key skills, including the following: 
    • Reading together. It’s still really important that your child continues to read aloud to you. The emphasis should be on reading fluently and with expression, understanding more complex plots and broadening their vocabulary as well as building an understanding of how punctuation and grammar are used. There is never an age when this is not an enjoyable and useful way to spend 10 minutes a day
    • Times tables practice. Good times-tables knowledge is vital for quick mental maths calculations and problem solving. Not all children learn times tables in the same way; to support your child’s learning, work out what will make times tables stick in their mind, whether that’s singing them, putting them into practice with puzzles, playing games with them or writing them out.
    • Practise weekly spellings. Spelling is an area of learning about which many parents are concerned. For tips on how to support your child learn their weekly spellings see the ‘Helping with Spelling’ section below.
  2. Use resources available on the internet.There are many resources online to support with English and Maths. We have provided a list of our recommendations below.
  3. Paid resourcesMany publishers produce workbooks designed for practise at home. In school, we use the CGP revision booklets in both English and Maths to support children’s learning.There are also many ‘revision’ apps available for children to use at home on tablets.