English
For a full overview of the English Curriculum:
- English Writing Overview
- English Reading Overview
- English Writing Progression of Skills
- English Reading Progression of Skills
Reading
Our priority is both the teaching of reading skills and the enjoyment of literature, enabling children to become lifelong, confident readers. We know that for all our children to become fluent readers and writers, phonics must be taught through a systematic and structured phonics programme.
We use the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised programme to plan and provide daily engaging phonics lessons. All our staff are fully trained in this scheme and receive regular updates as needed.
As children build fluency, comprehension skills become our main area of focus and questioning looks at skills which we call VIPERS (Vocabulary, Inference, Prediction, Explanation, Retrieval, Sequence or Summarise). We teach Whole Class Reading lessons through a scheme of work we have developed ourselves which ensures a clear skills progressions and a wide variety of high-quality and diverse text types.
You will see:
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EYFS:
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KS1
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KS2
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● Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised being taught ● ‘Keep up’ sessions daily to ensure all children make progress ● ‘Let’s Read’ sessions in the afternoons: prosody, comprehension and decoding ● Star Reader – weekly ‘story bag’ reward to take home and share ●Reading Passport – our initiative to encourage children to read a diverse range of 30 books over the school year |
●Whole Class Reading ●Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised being taught ● ‘Keep up’ sessions daily to ensure all children make progress ● ‘Let’s Read’ sessions in the afternoons: prosody, comprehension and decoding ●Reading Raffle – weekly prize for exceptional effort in reading ●Reading Champions – Our Year 6 children using their lunch times to read with younger children ●Reading Passport – our initiative to encourage children to read a diverse range of 30 books over the school year |
● Whole Class Reading ● Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised being taught ● Teachers and teaching assistants continue to monitor children’s reading progress through a combination of individual, group and shared reading. ●Reading Raffle – weekly prize for exceptional effort in reading ●Reading Passport – our initiative to encourage children to read a diverse range of 40 books over the school year |
Writing
We aim for all our children to be able to write independently in a variety of genres and for a range of purposes with fluency, accuracy and enjoyment by the end of Year 6. We believe children should understand from an early age that their writing needs to be accurate, legible and set out in an appropriate way. It is our hope for them that they will learn to enjoy writing, see the value of it and for them to leave us as confident, accomplished writers.
In order to ensure that all pupils learn to be these confident writers we encourage children to write creatively whilst teaching key writing skills explicitly and systematically. We use a range of stimuli including picture books, longer texts (fiction and non-fiction) poetry and video.
Our teachers plan structured lessons which scaffold them through modelled or shared writing to the desired outcome. Additionally, for each piece, children are taught applicable grammar concepts daily.
You will see:
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Across the school: |
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● Clear progression in knowledge, complexity of tasks and expectations year on year. ●A wide range of strategies to encourage children to plan carefully and write accurately ● A shared understanding of what success will look like for each genre/outcome. ● Writing displayed and celebrated all over the school. ● Teachers providing regular helpful feedback through either ‘live’ or written marking. ● Time planned within lessons for children to respond to marking and feedback. ●A wide variety of genres being taught ● Writing stamina developed by providing daily opportunities to write independently and for extended periods. ● Editing and reviewing daily. ● Peer marking as an additional way for children to respond to writing. |
Intent
We want all children to leave Willow Learning Trust schools with a life-long love of reading and a love of books because research tells us that:
●Reading for pleasure has many non-literacy benefits and can increase empathy, improve relationships with others, reduce the symptoms of depression and improve wellbeing throughout life (The Reading Agency 2015).
●Students who read for pleasure make significantly more progress in vocabulary, spelling and maths than children who read very little (Sullivan and Brown 2013).
We want our children to leave us as highly competent writers across a range of genres and in different styles because we want our children prepared for the demands of secondary school and future careers.
Implementation
What do our classrooms look like?
At Aragon Primary School, we believe that all classrooms should be language-rich, with children engaged in high-quality dialogue. We create structured opportunities for meaningful conversation, discussion and talk around reading and writing. Questioning forms the basis of a lot of our teaching and we strongly encourage children to be inquisitive and to share their thoughts confidently in a supportive environment. Much of our teaching is dialogic, so that children are actively involved in their learning, with a range of strategies used for checking understanding and taking responses.
You will see:
● Lots of class discussion, talk partners and debating.
● Listening to and participating in stories, poems, rhymes and songs.
● Use of sentence-stems to scaffold oral responses in class.
● Reciting, reading aloud and presenting to an audience.
● Drama activities to enliven and enrich children’s learning.
● Lots of purposeful Talk for Writing
● Opportunities for children to talk about their reading and writing.
● Collaborative group work.
Impact
Reading
Children can use their learnt phonic strategies to decode unknown words
Children read for pleasure
Teachers are role-models for good reading
Children can read aloud confidently with intonation and expression, drawing on subtle clues form the text
Children can discuss their opinions and thoughts about a text
Children can compare texts and give reasons for their judgements
Children can explain and comment on structural devices in a text
Children can evaluate, comment and compare different styles of writers – providing evidence and explanations
Children can perform poetry in public using tone, pitch and other devices to engage an audience
Writing
Our children become independent, confident writers able to write in any given genre.
Our children have a clear understanding of grammatical terminology
Our children can understand the importance of planning writing and editing it.
Our children can write effectively for a range of audiences and purposes, selecting appropriate language and form.
Our children can use a range of punctuation, tenses and dialogue in their writing effectively.
Our children can use grammar and vocabulary efficiently to suit the needs of the writing.
Our children can write at speed with accuracy using cursive script.