English
"The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go."
Dr Seuss, author.
In our school the teaching of English allows pupils to incrementally build their skills in reading and writing within a carefully designed curriculum.
Reading
We aim to create successful, fluent, readers who will monitor their understanding of what they are reading and review the text when something does not make sense. We follow a set sequence for Whole Class Guided Reading using ‘Fred's Teaching' Resources. In reading lessons, pupils are explicitly taught strategies including inference, questioning, clarifying, summarising, prediction and activating prior knowledge. The pupils use these strategies to check how well they comprehend what they have read, and overcome barriers to comprehension. Pupils develop skills in skimming and scanning, forming opinions, thinking aloud, asking questions, getting the gist, connecting to prior knowledge, inference and prediction. These skills are applied by the pupils with increased independence when interacting with texts across all curriculum areas.
Teachers develop a love of reading by reading a wide range of novels and texts daily with the children.
Children have access to a wide range of books for their own reading pleasure in our class book corners and the school Library. They are encouraged to select books which will interest and challenge them. Reading scheme books are fully decodable and are closely matched with our Phonics scheme.
Phonics
The teaching of phonics begins in Reception using Rocket Phonics, a validated phonics scheme, and teaching continues daily to at least the point where children can read almost all words fluently.
We follow a systematic approach where each grapheme is introduced clearly; a focus is placed on blending to read and segmenting to spell. This focus provides children with the skills they need to begin to read words, captions and whole sentences as soon as possible. Children are taught to read letters or groups of letters by saying the sound(s) they represent. Children can then start to read words by blending (synthesising) the sounds together to make a word.
Writing
Writing skills are developed through a text-based approach. Pupils develop an understanding of purpose and form and the ability to evaluate the notion of appropriateness. A book spine provides a range of topic-based and age appropriate texts to ‘hook' the pupils in at the start of a unit. Opportunity is given to explore the text in order to build an understanding of the writer's craft so that pupils develop a deep understanding of the components of writing – planning, drafting, sharing, evaluating, revising and editing. The writing curriculum plans for diverse stimuli for writing which encourages high levels of engagement. Allowing pupils, the time to explore the text, introduce new writing skills before applying the skills with greater levels of independence ensures a deeper understanding of writerly choices. Texts are carefully chosen to deepen pupils' knowledge of the wider curriculum, while ensuring pupils are immersed in our rich and varied literary heritage.
