English

Reading

We teach shared reading each day using the Steps to Read programme. Teachers explicitly teach children the reading skills and strategies they need to become a proficient and confident reader. Lessons are progressive and taught sequentially across the year using engaging texts to promote a lifelong love of reading. Vehicle Texts are carefully selected to broaden children’s reading experiences and expose them to high level vocabulary. The Vehicle Texts used in Steps to Read are then available for children to explore and enjoy in their entirety beyond the taught sessions. Teachers will read these texts aloud daily to the children during dedicated whole class reading time. The texts are also available for the children to read themselves in the class reading area.

For individual reading in Key Stage 2, children use the Accelerated Reader Programme. They read books matched to their reading age so that they are appropriately challenged. After reading each book they take a quiz to assess their comprehension of the text. The immediate feedback motivates children and provides teachers with valuable data. The extensive choice of books ensures that there are books to interest every reader, promoting a love of reading in our children.

Phonics and Early Reading

We want your child to love reading – and to want to read for themselves, so we put as much energy as we possibly can into making sure that every single child learns to read as quickly as possible. 

Read, Write Inc is a tried and tested, highly successful phonics programme for children aged 4 to 7 who are learning to read and write. It teaches children how to both decode and understand written language to become confident and enthusiastic readers and writers. This is achieved by a dynamic approach to teaching phonics that is consistent across the school using the Read, Write Inc phonics resources and fully decodable reading books.

Children are grouped according to their ability in Foundation Stage and Key Stage 1 to ensure that teaching is matched to their level. Phonics in Foundation Stage and Key Stage 1 takes place on a daily basis. Children in Key Stage 2 that still require phonics teaching, continue with a specially tailored programme to meet their individual needs. 

Shared Reading forms part of the daily phonics lessons and is led by the reading teachers. All texts are linked to the child’s phonic ability. Children enjoy one focus text per week and learning activities support accurate and fluent reading to facilitate comprehension. In addition, children take fully decodable reading books home to further practise skills learnt at school. These books are matched to each child’s phonics ability and are closely monitored by the reading teachers to ensure that children are reading books of an appropriate level. The home reading book is changed once children have read it 3 times. This is to ensure that the book has been read enough times to develop speedy, fluent reading, spending less time segmenting and blending words and more time understanding what has been read. Each child also takes home a picture book to share with their adults at home. 

We start by teaching phonics to the children in the Reception class. This means that they learn how to read the (Phonemes) sounds in words and how those sounds can be written down (Graphemes). This is essential for reading, but it also helps children learn to spell well.

We teach the children simple ways of remembering these sounds and letters. Once the children have learnt to blend accurately, they start to read with fluency. This is achieved through speedy reading of individual words and repeated reads of their shared reading books. ‘Tricky words’ such as ‘once’ ‘said’ ‘the’ are not phonetically decodable and these are taught explicitly as part of the reading session.   For more information and to access eBooks linked to your child’s phonics phase, please click on the link https://www.oxfordowl.co.uk/

English -Writing

Our English lessons follow Pathways to Write which uses a range of stimulating, diverse and engaging books as an anchor for a variety of writing opportunities. 

In lessons teachers seek to combine a variety of creative, stimulating activities that include the use of visual tools and various stimuli that inspires the children to create writing which is original and influenced by rich vocabulary. 

We believe that children who are continuously exposed to high-level, well-structured models will progress their skills and, before leaving us at Year 6, they will be competent in composition and transcription and ultimately be inspired to write.