Our Intent
We aim to make our children competent and confident users of English. Through a balance of different teaching methods, we aim to help children acquire the skills they need to access all areas of the curriculum and equip them with the ability to communicate effectively in our society. These English skills will also be central to gaining employment and being modern, global citizens.
As a school, we aim to ensure that the pupils:
- Read fluently and with good understanding
- Develop the habit of reading widely and often, for both pleasure and information
- Acquire a broad vocabulary through reading a wide range of books
- Have a solid understanding of English grammar
- Write clearly, coherently and accurately, adapting their language and style for a range of purposeful contexts and audiences.
- Use discussion in order to learn; our children should be able to both listen attentively and clearly explain their thinking and ideas to others.
Our Implementation
Reading
Reading is a fundamental part of everything we do at Village Primary School. All staff endeavour to nurture a love of reading; our aim is to provide all children with the tools they need to foster a love of reading, whatever their literary experience or knowledge. We believe that reading for pleasure should be a fundamental part of childhood and lifelong learning whatever the child’s ability, background or culture. We use a wide variety of picture, story and reference books, specifically selected to engage our pupils. At all times when reading, we encourage children to think about and discuss what they have read. Once they have reached a good level of competence, this is used to help them with their learning in other areas of the curriculum. This in turn will make a huge contribution to their educational achievement.
Reading develops your vocabulary as you are exposed to more words. Year 4
Reading Resources
The development of Reading is supported by our own school graded reading scheme which uses resources from a variety of published materials including:
- Oxford Reading Tree
- Floppy’s Phonics
- Big Cat Phonics
- Rigby Star
- Project X
- Dandelion readers
- Read Write Inc
- Literature by familiar and unfamiliar authors
Phonics
In school we follow ‘Floppy’s Phonics’ for the teaching of phonics. This is a rigorous and synthetic programme which uses a wide range of multisensory resources.
Teacher’s will keep an ongoing record of the sounds words the children have learnt on a weekly basis. This assessment is carried out in a way which is appropriate for the age of the children. Children in EYFS will be assessed in a practical way and staff will record the sounds they know.
Year 1 – formal assessment termly. Children will be assessed on their ability to read words containing the sounds they have learnt, for example the sound ‘ai’ in the words ‘rain’.
Autumn 1 (end of September)
Autumn 2 (December)
Spring 1 (February)
Spring 2 (April)
Summer 1 (Phonics screen)
Reading puts more into your mind and makes you a better learner. Year 5
Writing
- Children are encouraged to write from entry into the Early Years Foundation Stage. Writing is integral in all areas in the Nursery with the development of an apprenticeship approach to writing development.
- Spellings are sent home weekly from Y1 to Y6. The accurate spelling of high frequency words is seen as a priority. Spellings are differentiated thoroughly across the key stages.
- Spelling competitions take place each term to make spelling fun, aspirational and even more relevant.
- Spelling shed is a purchased scheme that supports teachers and children. The children can play spelling -style games whilst adults have access to a rage of resources.
- Children in each class have access to stage appropriate word cards and alphabet cards. These have been developed with the needs of that particular year group in mind.
- Each classroom has a selection of dictionaries and thesaurus’ selected to meet the needs of that particular year group. A summary of this provision is contained in the appendix.
- As part of writing development, children are expected to develop a clear, fluent and legible joined handwriting style. In the Early Years Foundation Stage children are taught the principles of letter formation using guidance from the document ‘Developing Early writing’ using a pre-cursive style of handwriting. The school then teaches cursive style of handwriting, when appropriate, from Y1 to Y6, featuring exit and entry strokes.
- The composition of writing is taught using direct teacher modelling and based within a sequential, rigorous unit of work.
We love reading and it’s important we do the things we love. Year 6