Skip to content ↓

Tyndale Primary School

Homework

At Tyndale, our homework expectations have been designed to: 

  • Ensure all knowledge and learning is for life and not just for a term, or for a test. The core purpose of our homework expectations is to provide every child with the knowledge they need to succeed in life. All our children receive the same knowledge and expectations to learn this knowledge. 

  • Provide consistency by ensuring children complete the same homework every night. 

  • Give your child additional time to develop their reading, widen their vocabulary, become more fluent with maths, and consolidate their learning. 

All homework is crucial to the progress our children will make as it provides opportunities for children to retrieve the knowledge they have been taught resulting in children knowing and remembering more.

The Knowledge Organisers page for each year group details the core knowledge we aim for children to know and remember to enable them to build on this knowledge in lessons. Children can use their Self Quizzing techniques to learn this knowledge. 

If your child is preparing for the KS2 SATs, we have curated a Maths KS2 SATs Booster page with resources to support their understanding and consolidate their learning: Maths KS2 SATs Booster - Click Here.

Reading at Home 

At Tyndale Primary School, we prioritise developing an embedded culture which fosters a love of reading. Teaching a child to read is our primary focus alongside developing a love of reading in order to open the doors of learning which books offer. Reading has now become a core part of everyday life at Tyndale.

EYFS & KS1

Children are provided with a reading book for them to read at home, which is in line with their reading age and phonics level. This book must be brought into school daily so that it can be easily changed by the class teacher to effectively enable your child's reading progress.

Each day, we expect children in EYFS and KS1 to read for a minimum of 20 minutes and for this reading to be recorded in your child's reading record.  

KS2

Children are provided with a reading book for them to read at home, which is in line with their reading age. This book must be brought into school daily so that it can be easily changed by the class teacher to effectively enable your child's reading progress.

Each day, we expect children in KS2 to read for a minimum of 30 minutes and for this reading to be recorded in your child's planner (Years 2 - 6).

Reading Target Cards

Children are also provided with a reading target card in line with their reading age/level. This target card is inclusive of a list of criteria for children to achieve in order to accurately assess their understanding of the texts they are reading and to effectively enable their progress onto the next reading stage. Please inform the class teacher if you think your child has achieved one or more of the criteria on their card by recording this in their reading record or planner. 

Rewards and Incentives

There are a number of school incentives for reading such as 'Reading Rockstar' awards, termly trophies, class teacher and peer award recognition.

What Does the Research Say?

A growing number of studies show that promoting reading can have a major impact on children and adults and their future success. 

Research has found that children who love reading had:

  • Higher scores on the cognitive and social/attitudinal competencies

  • Consistently higher scores in mathematics, reading, logical problem-solving and attitude

  • Higher average scores for engagement in school, positive communication and relations with family, and positive friendships

  • Showed less risky behaviour

  • Higher levels of motivation towards school.

Those who did not enjoy reading were more likely to be:

  • Heavier television watchers over time

  • Exposed to bullying experiences

  • Seen by teachers as having difficult classroom behaviour at age 12

  • Less likely to complete their homework

  • Less likely to be enthusiastic about going to school.

(The Growing Independence: Summary of Key Findings from the Competent Learners at 14 Project report)

Reading Lists

Below, you can find our Tyndale Reading Spine which we strongly recommend to parents/carers when purchasing books for their children. We also hold a copy of each title in this list at school in our class libraries for children to select during reading for pleasure time. 

Planners at Home 

At Tyndale Primary, our mission is to give our children the best chance of success. In order to support our children in achieving this success, all children in Years 2 - 6 are given a planner, which is a compulsory item that they must bring to school with them every day. 

Preparing Our Children for Success

Teaching our children to use a planner is an effective way to prepare our children for their transition to secondary school, teach them to be professional and organised and to assist their ability to retain the knowledge they are taught at school.

Planner Usage

Children will use their planners every day during term time to record a variety of information:

Self Quizzing

Children will complete 5 self-quizzing questions per day, which will be a balance of new knowledge they've been taught at school that day and some questions targeting prior knowledge they've been taught for example knowledge they were taught yesterday, last week, last month, last term and last year. 

Reading Record

Children will record their daily reading in their planner so that they do not need to keep an additional reading record. Children are expected to read for a minimum of 30 minutes per day. 

More information about expectations of home reading can be found above.

Spelling Practice

Children in Years 1 - 6 will be provided with a termly overview of spellings that encourage the teaching of spelling rules. Therefore, we will not be giving a formal weekly test but would instead do a termly spelling test to occur in the final week of each term in order to assess understanding of introduced spelling rules. This is no more than 25 words in KS1. Within KS2 this can take the form of dictated sentences, that include multiple sentences for the words we would like to check retention and learning of. Children can still do their daily 'look, cover, write, check' in their planners.

Parent and Teacher Communication

At the bottom of each page in the child's planner there is an optional comments box to facilitate this line of communication. Please do not hesitate to use this facility within the planner or book an appointment to come in and see us if you ever have any concerns.

It is the responsibility of our children to bring the planner into school every day and to complete the daily tasks within it. Failure to do so, will result in study support with the senior leadership team during a lunchtime to complete the missing work. Children need to arrive to school on time, organised and prepared to start their day - every second counts.

Character Passport Challenges at Home 

Each class has a Character Class Passport portfolio book which outlines different character challenges for children to complete. Character challenges are set to be completed in and out of school to provide children with a range of contexts.

Character challenges that are out of school will be set on the Virtual Message board for your child's class.

Study Skills 

At Tyndale, we explicitly teach our children ‘Study Skills’ to improve organisation, enable increased retention of knowledge and promote efficient time management so that our children get the ‘best chance of success’ in their primary education and are fully prepared to effectively transition into their secondary school careers. 

Self quizzing

All children from Years 2 - 6 are provided with a planner to record their daily reading log, spelling practice and self-quizzing in. Their planner is a compulsory item and it is an expectation that children bring their planner to school every day.

What is self quizzing?

Children answer 3 - 5 self quizzing questions daily based on the new learning they've covered in their lessons that day and past learning, which are based on a subject specific knowledge organiser and vary in difficulty according to their command word (e.g. identify, describe or explain).

Why is self quizzing important?

Reviewing notes in detail following each lesson, or at minimum sometimes during the day before going to bed, will greatly increase children’s ability to recall what they have learned.

At the end of nine weeks, children who have reviewed their notes within a day recalled about 75% of what they had been taught. Children who did not review their notes following their class were not even able to recall 50% of the information covered during the lesson after one day and only slightly more than 20% of the information nine weeks later.

How to self quiz

Teachers select their questions and children learn to compose their questions based on three levels of difficulty. When children become more competent using knowledge organisers they can start quizzing themselves.

A good study habit is to have a mixture of these three types of difficulty questions and that the questions are carefully selected to target the areas children do not fully understand.

Easy

(What is…)

What is a multiple?

What is a square number?

What is a prime number?

You could use a key word section on your knowledge organiser to answer these types of questions. 

Medium

(Describe…)

Describe the purpose of a comma?

Describe the role of a fronted adverbial?

Describe the features of persuasive language?

Using the subject specific content covered in your lesson you can add more information to your ‘what is’ question.

Challenging

(Explain how…)

Explain how the product of two prime numbers multiplied together aren’t always a prime number?

Explain why a square number is called a ‘square’?

Explain why 1 isn’t a prime number?

These questions require you to go into more detail by providing a context and explaining the 'why' to deepen your understanding and link and build your new knowledge together with prior knowledge.

What does this look like?

An example of a self quizzing lesson that would be taught to children in Year 7 in September when they first get their planners can be found here