Supporting your child with English at home

"We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect."
Anaïs Nin

​

Your child’s class teacher will be setting different forms of writing as part of their home learning but to support with their writing you could:

Early writers: 

• Help children with letter formation and forming sentences; 

• Children to write regularly; 

• Read with your child to expose them to more vocabulary; 

• Get children to write for a range of purposes e.g. shopping lists; 

• Role play – making puppets, dressing up etc. 

• Using different writing tools e.g. chalk and different surfaces for writing; 

• Forming ideas aloud; 

• Exploring letters by searching for them in the environment, cutting them out of magazines and putting them together to form words; magnetic letters; drawing letters in sand/ shaving foam or making them with playdough. 

More confident writers:

• Continue to talk and discuss writing;

• Read and discuss sentences aloud before writing them down; 

• Encourage re-reading of work to ensure it makes sense; 

• Practising weekly spellings and words from the spelling lists for your year group (see below for these); 

• Continue to read with your child and encourage independent reading to support with vocabulary; 

• Model writing with your child; 

• Write for a range of purposes e.g. emails. 

​

Spellings for each year group: 

​

Year 1 and 2 

Year 3 and 4 

Year 5 and 6

​

​

Useful websites: 

Literacy Shed - short films for children that can be used to help create writing from. 

Grammarsaurus - links for home learning and useful resources for Grammar teaching.