Year 1

At Sacred Heart, we use The Oxford Reading and Writing Criterion to aid us in our assessment of reading and writing skills. 

These criteria describe the reading and writing journey that children make, from their first pre-writing behaviours through to a more complex and sophisticated understanding and mastery of writing skills. The reading and Writing Criterion Scales break down children’s  development into small steps so that it is easy to identify the point children have reached, and the steps they need to make next in order to progress.

Although the criteria are set out in a rough hierarchy, every child’s reading and writing journey is different, so the  Criterion Scales support a ‘best-fit’ teacher judgement against national expectations.

Essential Year 1 Reading skills:

By the end of Year 1, children should be able to:

 Use a wide range of phonic knowledge to decode and blend unfamiliar words and read them aloud accurately.

  Read most common exception words.

  Read an increasing number of words automatically and fluently.

  Use a growing knowledge of vocabulary to gain meaning from texts.

  Talk about texts by, for example: retelling stories, predicting events or information, answering simple literal and evaluative questions (expressing basic opinions).

Essential Year 1 writing skills:

The following skills must be secured as quickly as possible in Year 1:

  Write three or more simple statements on a given subject that can be read without the child’s help and that make sense, although letter shapes and spelling may not be fully accurate. There may be no full stops (or there may be one or more in the wrong places) and use of capitals and lower case letters may not be fully established.

Year 1 – end of year expectations in writing:

By the end of Year 1, children should be able to:

 Produce a paragraph or more of developed ideas independently that can be read without help from the child. The outcome may be more like spoken than written language but must not be a retelling.

 Write one or more sentences extended by the use of ‘and’ or another conjunction and two or more sentences showing the correct use of full stops and capital letters.

 Usually spell most CVC words and most common words from the Reception and Year 1 Word lists correctly.

 Produce letter shapes which are mainly accurate, with clear spaces between most words.