Welcome to Woodpecker's Class page

Welcome to the academic year 2025-2026. You will find on this class page items outlining what takes place in the class, important dates to take note of together with occasional updates and photos of the exciting curriculum the children are engaged in.

Home work

Homework is given out at the end of day on Friday. It is always due back in on the following Friday, giving the children an opportunity to talk to the teacher throughout the week about it, if they find it difficult. The children will have a two sided piece which will have the weekly ten spellings to learn, a piece of English which usually requires children to access grammar term knowledge. On the other side, a 60 question times table challenge will be undertaken together with arithmetic questions comprising of the four operations, missing numbers, fractions, decimals and place value.

Spelling and Times Tables Importance!

Learning to spell the 54 statutory words is crucial. We drip feed these words into their spelling homework. These words are given to the children to spell, in a test condition environment three times this year. Alongside this assessment is the MTC (multiple times table check) assessment. This takes place in May across the country.

In order to prepare for this, the children are asked to complete a times table practice over three days, a sound check on TTR (Times Table Rock Stars) each Tuesday afternoon. We record their scores and any child who scores 25/25 will receive a certificate in celebration assembly. Children who do not score over 19/25 will be given intervention times table homework. This is one sheet of 60 questions to be timed over 4 minutes each day (Monday to Friday), for two weeks.

Knowing how to spell the year 4 words and recall times table fact at speed will lead to children feeling more confident about their writing, multiplying and dividing!

Reading

Every child takes home two books from the class library. All children have access to this resource and it is important that adults and parents are reading with their children at home, routinely. As children read with you, ask them questions about the text, engage in a discussion about the characters, talk about the words they do not know the meaning of and ask them to recount and give a summary of what they have just read to you. Please indicate in the blue record book you have done this, simply with initials, as we do monitor reading.

Important dates

Parents evening - Tuesday/Wednesday 21st and 22d of October