Dear Parents

Educating a child needs the involvement and co-operation of teachers, students and parents for it to be successful. We believe it is important that you are as informed as possible about how your children learn and how you can help them progress.

In the primary years it is far more than just the language that is being learned. At this age, children are also developing their thinking, social and physical skills. It is therefore, essential for activities and materials to take this into account and to focus on developing ‘the whole child’. Allowing children to hear, see and do as well as drawing attention to aspects such as cooperating and turn-taking, developing dictionary skills and learner independence.

In order to support and reinforce the learning that is taking place at school, you can do the following at home:

• Talk to your child about what they heard, saw and did in class.
• Encourage your child to talk about who they worked or played with and who they helped in class.
• Listen to the songs and chants together and ask them to teach you the actions they learned in class.
• When out and about, draw attention to examples of good values (not littering, sharing, turn-taking, queuing patiently etc.) and talk about them together.
• Praise your child for trying and participating as well as for results.

Don’t worry if you don’t speak much, or even any English, you can do a lot of this in your language, especially when first starting out.

The main things are:

• Find out what they do know, rather than what they don’t know.
• Encourage and praise.
• Show an interest in what they are doing and learning.

Learning a language is something which takes time and patience. Over time your child will not only become a better and more confident user of English, but they will also learn skills that will make them better learners, world citizens and develop an enthusiasm and interest in language and learning.

This website will support and guide you in this process as we all work together to ensure the best for your child.

Activity 1: Smiley face

On a piece of paper, draw a short line for each letter of a word or phrase your child is learning.

Ask your child to guess the letters that are in the word / phrase, one by one.

If he / she guesses correctly write the letter in the correct position.

If he / she guesses incorrectly, write the letter on the paper, put a cross through it then draw a large circle to represent a face.

With each letter that is guessed incorrectly, add another feature to the face (two eyes, a nose, a smile, two ears, a neck, and hair).

The game continues until either the word is guessed or the face is complete.

Activity 2: Order the letters

Choose a word that your child will know and write the jumbled-up letters of that word on a piece of paper, followed by the correct number of lines for the number of letters.

Ask your child to unscramble the letters and write the real word beneath the anagram.

Activity 3: I spy

Choose an object in a room that you are sure your child knows the word for.

Say I spy a word beginning with (a letter).

Your child should call out words beginning with that letter.

If they guess correctly, choose another object and begin the game again.