Homework

As we have made some slight changes to homework I hope the following clarification is helpful. Your key part in supporting your child with homework is greatly appreciated.

I would like to stress the importance of reading with your child every day. As well as them reading to you, please do not overlook the pleasure and value of sharing a story with your child right through and beyond their primary years.

Years 2-6 will be bringing home their grammar homework for the whole term in the first week. This will give families the opportunity of tackling this homework at the most suitable time for them over the 6 week term. All 6 pieces will be due in at the end of the term.

All pupils in Years 2-6 will have 2 identical spelling folders, one for home and one for school. This should allow regular practice at home and school.

Each term every child will learn a poem by heart in their class. We are keen to help give St John’s pupils a repertoire of poetry for life. Time will be set aside in school for this initiative and pupils may also be asked to work on this at home. The value of learning by heart is outlined by the former poet laureate, Sir Andrew Motion –

As the phrase ‘learning by heart’ implies, this sort of remembering places the poem at a central place in ourselves and makes it precious; it allows the poem to draw strength from the emotional batteries we carry everywhere inside us, and reboots them; it makes the poem a permanent fixture of ourselves, so that its meanings change and develop as we grown. And as it does all these things, it combines ‘hard’ benefits (information, knowledge, even perhaps wisdom) with ‘soft’ things that matter just as much. Things like pleasure and fun and entertainment and entrancement.