English & Literacy
Learning to read is the most important thing your child will learn at school. Everything else depends on it; so we put as much energy as we possibly can into making sure that every single child learns to read as quickly as possible.
We want your child to love reading – and to want to read for themselves. This is why we put our efforts into making sure they develop a love of books as well as simply learning to read. See suggested reading lists for each year group at the bottom of this page.
Read Write Inc - Our approach to phonics
We start by teaching phonics in Reception and believe that this should be taught in an exciting and engaging way. We follow the Read Write Inc. Programme to support us with the planning and delivery of the teaching of reading and writing, enabling all children to develop the skills to be able to read quickly and easily. It follows a programme of teaching specific sounds and reading them in words. As children progress, they learn more complex sounds and read and spell trickier words.
Throughout the year, we will run specific Read Write Inc. workshops for parents to help adults at home to understand the approaches we use to teach early reading and writing skills. This will support pupil’s to make accelerated progress in this area. An introductory video link is available here for more information.
All of the children who are working on the RWI programme, will bring home a RWI book each week, as well as a book bag book. These books cover all of the sounds that the children have been taught which helps them to be successful in their reading. We also encourage children to bring home a book for enjoyment, which is one of our recommended reads for their age group. This is a book of their choice.
What is the phonics screening check?
In Year 1, all children are required to take the Government statutory phonics screening check which is a short assessment of children’s ability to read both real words and pseudo words. Children that do not pass the phonics screening check in Year 1 are then required to retake the test in Year 2.
For children who do not pass the check, a programme of personalised support will be put in place to support them throughout Year 2.
Reading
Once children have finished the RWI programme, they move onto our reading programme. Children take part in reading lessons that focus on vocabulary, comprehension and reading fluency. Children also have an Accelerated Reading lesson, where they take part in their weekly comprehension quiz and choose their new book for the week.
Children will bring home one Accelerated Reading book and are invited to bring home an additional book. This could be a recommended read for their age group or an additional Accelerated Reading book. Click here for more information about Accelerated Reader.
Comprehension
As reading is so important to our children’s learning and development, we ensure there is time focusing on this during our daily RWI and reading lessons. We have also incorporated a weekly comprehension lesson into our RWI and reading programmes to really encourage our children to develop their inference and understanding skills. In these lessons, we unpick and decode words and discuss what is happening in the text and predict what might happen next. We also discuss and learn the meaning of new words, helping us to increase our vocabulary. We then read questions linked to the text and use our inference skills to locate and find the answer.
Writing
Children are taught spelling, handwriting, writing for purpose and are encouraged to develop their creative writing skills. Some of this is delivered as part of the daily phonics sessions and also as part of the focused and independent learning activities.
We use a cursive handwriting script which teaches children the correct letter formations and also the different families of letter joins. Children across all year groups, from EYFS upwards, practise handwriting regularly.
Children are given opportunities to write for different purposes to really embed the importance of writing and give them the chance to develop their own skills. Writing is encouraged in a range of contexts in order to stimulate and engage our children.
Our writing lessons are always based around a specific book. Every week, we teach the children new vocabulary words, with the challenge of trying to use these words across the week. We teach different Alan Peat sentence types to support children’s sentence structure and to make their writing even more exciting. On Fridays, we celebrate our writing by taking part in our extended write lessons. This is where the children are asked to apply all their learning for the week and to independently write for a given purpose.
Reading Lists
Looking for ideas about what to read? Download our suggested reading lists for each year group below.
