We place the highest importance on the successful development of literacy skills. Our curriculum caters for English, teaching the development of reading, writing and speaking and listening is through our topics.
We believe that every child can be a good reader and teach them the skills to be able to achieve this. We encourage the love of reading and regularly undertake Buddy Reading and Paired Reading across the school. We invite families in to school for Family Reading on the last Friday of every month. Our classes enjoy storytime every day. We use a wide range of high quality texts to teach reading and books are levelled using the Oxford Reading Tree system of coloured bands to indicate suitability for different ages. Free readers can choose any texts from class reading shelves or our library.
For our earliest readers, we teach Phonics using the Little Wandle scheme of work. Phonics is a synthetic system of teaching reading by enabling children to decode the representation of letters (graphemes) into a sound (phoneme) and how to blend sounds together to make words and meaning. Our teaching of Phonics is supported by the use of Big Cat decodable phonics books (published by Collins) in hard copy and e-book format. More information about Little Wandle can be found here: Primary | Primary English | Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised W – Collins
We enable our pupils to become fantastic writers by encouraging them to become fantastic storytellers. We believe in the importance of being able to verbally tell a story before being able to write it down. We use a widely recognised system of teaching writing called Talk for Writing which enables pupils to hear, learn and re-enact texts before innovating them with their own ideas to make original versions. More information about Talk for Writing can be found here: Talk for Writing
We have separate Subject Intent Statements for Reading (including Phonics) and Writing which can be found below along with a selection of resources to support the teaching of reading at home. Parents are invited to join us regularly for workshops to learn more about how we teach English skills, particularly Phonics.
Our Subject Leader for English is Mrs Kate Sandells.