Help Your Child Settle into School

Transferring from nursery to primary school can be both an exciting and anxious time for parents and children. Planning well for transition, in partnership with parents, can ease a child’s entry into Reception class. Activities can be planned over a period of time to enable children to settle more quickly and progress in their learning, allowing them to grow confidently in their new setting. Please see our β€˜Settling into School’ booklet below, which can provide support for you, and answer any questions and queries you might have.

Useful Links and ResourcesΒ 

This page is aimed at supporting learning at home through providing you with ideas for games and activities to support your child’s development in Early Years. As children will be at different stages in their development, some of these games may not be suitable for them. If you want more ideas then please contact your child’s classroom teacher and they will be more than happy to help you.

Literacy

Maths

Understanding of the World (UW):

Internal Safety

Road Safety

Healthy Eating

Outdoor Safety

Home Learning

At Whitehall Park School we strongly believe that home learning can make a real difference to children. Not only does it provide a fantastic opportunity for you to share in your child’s learning journey and be involved in what they are learning in school, but academic studies also show that regular home learning has the potential to raise standards, to extend children’s knowledge, understanding and skills across the curriculum and also helps to improve children’s confidence, resilience and attitudes towards learning. Home learning can support your child with establishing good habits of working and organisation, and allows you to be actively involved in your child’s learning experience, which is vital to their success.

We therefore see home learning as a really important part of our school’s learning programme. And, as such, we try to set home learning opportunities that allows access to a range of different tasks to suit all abilities and provides open-ended opportunities which enables children to develop and extend their learning.

We feel that the best outcomes for children are when they are able to take control over their own learning, therefore we have chosen to use project-based tasks as home learning. The project will link closely with the topic your child is learning to embed their understanding of it. We expect that over a half-term children will research an aspect of their topic to present at the end of the half term. This may be in the form of a book, an A3 project board, a PowerPoint, a piece of art work – it is entirely up to your child how they would like to present it. Each week the teachers will ask the children to share something they have done towards their project which may require them to use a skill they have been using in class.

From Year 1 your child will also get mental maths and spellings home learning to complete. This will be sent home on a Friday and is due back the following Wednesday.

Whilst it is great that children attempt some home learning independently (especially from Year 1 onwards), parental involvement during the week will really help supporting children with their learning journey. The more involved you are in your child’s learning, even if that is reading through what your child has written, or commenting on their drawings or helping them to learn spelling the greater success he or she will have in school.

5 Top Tips
  • Little and Often! Encourage your child to do a little bit of homework every day so that they are not leaving it all to Tuesday night.
  • In the zone! Create the right atmosphere for learning. Knock the TV off and sit at the kitchen table with all the things that you need ready to support your learning.
  • Talking is Learning! Ask your child to explain to you or to a sibling what they are learning to do. Talk about the book they are reading. It will really help them to understand the learning.
  • Make it real! Can you find ways to transfer the learning to a real life context e.g. calculating how much money you need for to pay for an item in the shops?
  • Learning Together! Don’t be afraid to show your child that we are all still on a learning journey and need to access books and resources to support our leaning.

If you have questions regarding home learning then please do follow the usual systems for communicating with the school by speaking to your child’s class teacher or TA in the first instance. If necessary, you could also make an appointment to speak to your child’s Phase Leader or a member of the Leadership Team.

View our Home Learning policy here.