Year 1 English Content Descriptions - Language

For example:

• asking and answering questions in planned and unplanned discussions and conversations
• identifying emotions expressed in film or picture books and discussing what the characters may be feeling or thinking

For example:

• using conjunctions, such as because, when giving reasons
• communicating and experimenting with words to express likes and dislikes, such as fabulous, excellent, terrible, awful
• using adjectives and intensifiers, such as really like, like very much, extremely angry

For example:

• sequencing of events in recounts
• headings, images and diagrams in multimodal texts
• opening, plot development and ending in narratives
• following a written or multimodal recipe to participate in a shared activity, such as exploring the purpose of the headings in a recipe

For example:

• experimenting with repeated patterns, such as In the dark, dark woods …, when constructing texts

For example:

• identifying the subject and verb in clauses, such as the seagulls (subject) were flying (verb)
• responding to prompts to generate sentences that contain a subject and verb

For example:

• identifying nouns and verbs in simple sentences
• experimenting with the use of adverbs to enhance sentences
• sorting words into categories, such as noun, adjective, verb depending on the context they are used in

For example:

• interacting with and comparing images in picture books, short films or other multimodal texts
• discussing the meaning of complementary images or diagrams in a range of informative and imaginative texts

For example:

• identifying a range of punctuation marks when reading and beginning to use them to guide expression, such as using a question intonation
• writing their own name and those of some familiar places starting with a capital letter

For example:

• breaking spoken words into their individual phonemes, such as p‑o‑t, sh‑o‑t, th‑r‑ow, b‑e‑n‑d, b-r‑a‑n‑d

For example:

• generating new words, such as spot – deleting the [s] to make pot, changing the [o] in pot to [e] to make pet, changing the [t] in pet to [n] to make pen

For example:

• blending, segmenting, reading and writing one‑ and two-syllable words that contain
  • short vowels in the medial position: a, e, i, o, u
  • have common long vowels, such as <a_e> make, <ai> train, <ay> say; <ea> sea, <ee> need, <e> me; <i> tiny, <ie> pie, <i_e> life; <y> my; <o_e> bone, <oa> boat; <u_e> tube
  • start with common consonant blends (clusters), such as <bl>, <br>, <cl>, <cr>, <dr>, <fl>, <fr>, <gl>, <gr>, <pl>, <pr>, <sl>, <st>, <tr>
  • end with common blends (clusters), such as <st>, <ld>, <nd>, <lf>, <nt>
  • start with consonant digraphs, such as <wh>, <ph>
  • end with consonant digraphs, such as <ck>, <ng>, <ff>, <ll>, <ss>, <zz>

For example:

• identifying letters that represent a sound different to its common grapheme–phoneme correspondence, such as that <c> can also make an [s] sound as in circus or cent or that <s> at the end of words, such as is, was and his, is pronounced as [z]
• recognising that sometimes <y> can be a substitute vowel, such as in why or happy

For example:

• spelling CVC, CVCC, CCVC, CCVCC and CVVC words with common letter patterns, including spelling words that contain common r‑controlled vowels, such as <ar> far, and common diphthongs, such as <ow> cow, <ou> house
• drawing on a range of strategies and resources when writing to spell words with common letter patterns

For example:

• reading high-frequency words encountered in texts read independently
• drawing on a range of sources to write an increasing number of high-frequency words

For example:

• adding suffixes to a base word to make grammatical word families, such as jump, jumped, jumper, jumping
• categorising words