At Rotherfield, home learning plays an important role in helping children make progress by providing opportunities to embed classroom learning and develop fluency in key skills. It reinforces what has been taught in school and encourages good learning habits at home.

 Our home learning consists of three main elements:

1. Reading

At Rotherfield, guided reading and free choice books are sent home with your child every week, with a task to do linked to their teacher-given book, to help develop their fluency and comprehension.

Most importantly of all, in all year groups, we encourage children to be reading at home every day. Sharing a book together with your child gives you the opportunity to escape into another world together. Reading at home will help develop your child’s vocabulary, communication, empathy, imagination and concentration. Whether this is sharing books by reading together or your child beginning to read more independently, we advise that all children read for at least 15 - 20 minutes a day.

• Reception and Year 1 (and older children still on the phonics programme):
  Children take home a phonetically decodable book, carefully matched to the GPCs taught through Little Wandle (our phonics scheme). This book should be read several times across the week to build decoding, fluency and confidence.
  They also take home a ‘book to share’, chosen for enjoyment and quality discussion.
• Year 2 – Year 6:
  Pupils take home a banded book matched to their reading level and a free-choice book from the school library, to further encourage reading for pleasure.

After reading, we encourage discussion using prompts such as:
“What has happened so far?”, “Why do you think the author chose that word?”, “Does this book remind you of anything else you’ve read?”. Books are changed on a Tuesday,

2. Maths Practice

Maths home learning is designed to be short, regular and purposeful.

• Year 1 – 2:
  Daily practice of number facts on NumBots app.
• Years 2 – 6:
  Daily practice of times tables using Times Tables Rockstars app.

We recommend spending around ten minutes each day on these apps to build fluency and confidence in number skills.

3. Spellings

In Years 1–6, children receive weekly spellings linked to current classroom learning. These may come from:

• our phonics programme
• the spelling requirements of the National Curriculum
• topic-specific vocabulary being used across the curriculum

Children should practise these spellings at home throughout the week, before completing a spelling test to check their learning.