Young people live and learn in two worlds – home and school. The way the two connect and communicate can make an enormous difference to how children learn to manage in both places. By working together, we can achieve our vision and enable children to foster a lifetime love of learning. 

Showing our children that we both value education and use it in our daily lives can help children to develop positive attitudes toward school and learning and build confidence in themselves as lifetime learners. Often, the more supported a child feels, the more effectively they will acquire the knowledge, skills, resilience and heart to pursue and achieve their individual dreams.

At Hart Plain Junior School, we ask that children complete three weekly tasks at home to support them in their learning. These three tasks are; reading at home, completing a Scode spelling activity and a times tables frenzy.

Reading at Home

At HPJS we know that the skill of reading is essential to success. We work hard with parents to build skills with word reading, comprehension and stamina. The single most valuable activity that you can do to help your child to improve their reading is to read at home with your child every day - at least 5 times per week. This, beyond all else, will make your child a better reader. They will, of course, be practising at school as well, but that individual practise time (only 10-20 minutes daily) is what makes all the difference. Children should record each time they read at home in their reading diary. Their reading diary needs to be brought into school daily and will be checked by an adult.

All reading at home is checked and counted and children will receive the following awards: 

Bronze book worm     50 reads in total
Silver book worm        150 reads in total
Gold book worm         250 reads in total 

Scode Spelling Activity

Your child will come home with Super Scoder homework. These tasks are an opportunity for your child to practise what they have learnt in the classroom; they do not introduce new learning. To engage your child further and also to help to support your child with spelling at home Scode have created some videos on their website to go alongside these tasks. For these videos along with further information, hints and tips head over to the Scode website - www.scodespelling.com

Times Tables Frenzy

Maths is a big subject and we appreciate there’s more to it than times tables and there’s more to times tables than learning them off by heart. However, a lot of the rich, interesting maths is all about the multiplicative relationships and these are hard to fully grasp without fluent recall of the tables. For that reason, learning the tables is fundamental and we are working hard to equip our children with fluent recall of their times tables. When it comes to times tables, speed and accuracy are important – the more facts your child remembers, the easier it is for them to do harder calculations. 

We therefore would like children to be completing a weekly times tables frenzy.

The ultimate goal is to complete the whole frenzy in 5 minutes however, as practise, we would like your child to complete as many of the tables they can. Please do not worry about the time taken to complete this. Children must spend a minimum of 5 minutes completing the frenzy but can take longer if needed. If your child is finding the times tables frenzy difficult at first, encourage them to concentrate on the 2, 5 and 10s columns.