At Blackhorse we focus our home-work on the key skills which have the most impact on learning: regular reading with an adult, learning spell-ings & phonics and learning number facts. Whilst other pieces of home-work may be set from time to time, practising these areas at home are essential to your child’s learning.

This page will help you get the most our of home learning.

Reading Homework:

Reading at home regularly has more impact than any other home learning with recent re-search showing that children who read at home in primary school leave school with GCSE’s which are a grade higher than those who don’t.

We ask that all parents read with their child for 20 minutes or more 5 times per week and record this in the reading diary.

The best way to do this is to have a regular session during the day where you read with your child (just before bedtime is good).

Younger children will have reading books sent home which match the letter sounds which they have been learning during their phonics lessons. These are 'fully-decodable' which means that your child should be able to read every word in the book. 

Older children will continue to access strucured reading scheme books, which are colour coded. Reading scheme books have prompt questions at the back which you can use to check your child’s understanding so please use these. Non-reading scheme books have also been added to our book banding system so that children can read 'real' novels at a level which is appropriate to them. 

You can find out more about our approach to the teaching of reading here. 

Phonics Homework:

Each week your child will either bring home a phonics sound investigation or a list of spellings to learn.
Phonics investigations:

Each week, the children in YR & Y1 will be asked to complete a phonics investigation based on the sound which they are learning that week. This will usually involve finding other words with a similar letter pattern and learning them.

In Y2 children will either practise spelling rules or be given words to learn form the Y2 word list.
Spelling Lists:

Each year group has specific spelling rules to cover and a list of ‘Hot words’. The spelling rules are taken from the National Curriculum and the ‘Hot words’ are taken from the ‘Years 3&4 and Years 5&6 exception word lists’ which is also outlined in the National Curriculum.

Children in KS2 will either be asked to learn a selection of these words and/ or complete a phonics investigation for their spelling home-work each week.

Maths Homework:

Each week your child will get 1 ‘Learn it’. This is a simple number facts which your child needs to learn by heart. Your child shouldn’t hesitate before answering their learn its as they are de-signed to be an automatic ‘call and response’ which requires no thinking - just memorising.

As well as learning the ‘learn it’ fact, children are also expected to learn the inverse fact (the children call these ‘fact families’). For example:
Learn it fact: 3 x 4 = 12
Fact Family: 4 x 3 = 12, 12 ÷ 4 = 3, 12 ÷ 3 = 4

Times Table Rock Stars!
As well as their Learn its, children in years 1-6 are expected to practice their times tables eve-ry week using the online game ‘Times Table Rock Stars’. Children are expected to play the following number of games in GARAGE mode:

Y1-2 = 10 games per week.
Y3-4 = 15 games per week.
Y5-6 = 20 games per week.

Handwriting Homework:

Children are taught cursive handwriting at Blackhorse and keep the same consistent style all the way through school.

Blackhorse Handwriting Rules:
1. We don’t join capital letters.
2. We start all lower case letters on the line.
3. We don’t take our pen off the paper until the word is finished (then we go back and dot the I’s and cross the T’s).

Your child may get handwriting homework from time to time so please follow these rules and use the school style when teach-ing writing at home.