English

Reading

Intent 

"The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go." - Dr Seuss. 

Books and reading are at the heart of our English curriculum. We believe that reading truly opens doors: doors to knowledge and understanding; doors to new worlds and experiences; to a rich variety of people, cultures, beliefs; to the past and to the future; to developing and expanding vocabulary and internalising grammatical phrasing; to understanding self and others; to creativity and fun.

At All Saints, our intent is for our children to receive a rich, comprehensive reading program, offering a range of opportunities to develop as fluent, enthusiastic, confident and life-long readers, who read for interest, information and enjoyment.

We aim: 

• To encourage every child to develop a love of reading.

• To foster an interest in words and their meanings and to gain an appreciation and life-long love of books from a variety of genres

• To enable children to find books interesting, to read with enjoyment and to evaluate and justify their preferences

• To enable our children to read confidently, fluently, accurately and with understanding

• To employ a full range of reading cues- phonic, graphic, syntactic, and contextual- to allow the children monitor, correct and make sense of their own reading.

• To develop a suitable technical vocabulary through which children may discuss the understanding of their reading

• To develop reading skills in tandem with those of writing, so that the children may function in society as literate readers for life.

• To develop and create reading opportunities across the curriculum, to make it meaningful and relevant to the children.

• To be able to use books confidently and accurately in order to find out about the World and develop deeper understanding.

• To celebrate the gift of reading and appreciate the rich variety of books, stories and texts we have in school, in libraries, online and at home.

Implementation 

Learning to read involves two main sets of skills: word recognition and language comprehension. 

As the children begin their learning journey, the dominant focus is on developing word recognition. However, at All Saints, we recognise the importance of also developing the children’s language comprehension at the early stages and so we ensure that teaching includes developing a range of strategies including: 

• Phonic knowledge (visual information)

• Grammatical knowledge (structural information)

• Word recognition and graphic knowledge (visual information)

• Contextual knowledge (meaning)

Teachers plan sessions to develop and practise these skills, which also involves the teacher reading a range of high quality and engaging texts to the children. We believe that reading is not only an important life skill and a way of learning new information, but is also a great source of pleasure. Therefore, many different opportunities are planned for to develop both the children’s reading skills and their enjoyment of reading across the curriculum. Many of the starting points for our termly topics are based upon exciting, good quality books. 

Reading opportunities include: daily independent reading; daily story time (adult reading to children) throughout the school; the novel curriculum; visits to the local library; book clubs; talking about reading; discussing favourite books; recommendations; interesting plot lines and characters etc.; accessing the texts in the online Reading Plus Programme; reading as a whole class and in small groups; reading widely across the curriculum areas to name but a few. In this way, children learn to appreciate and love books and gain a real source of pleasure for life.

Reading and Phonics Schemes used in School 

In Key Stage 1, the children follow the Read, Write, Inc.  phonic programme, in line with the 2014 National Curriculum, and are taught phonics daily. Phonically regular texts are provided at these early stages so that children have the opportunity to practise and apply their phonic knowledge and skills and their knowledge of common exception words. Home readers are chosen to match their phonic learning and are changed regularly dependent on the age and stage of the child. 

Children’s attainment and progress in phonics is carefully and regularly assessed and tracked using our Phonic assessment tool, this is completed half-termly so that children are working at their appropriate level for phonics.  As the children’s ability to segment and blend develops, they are presented with a wider range of reading books.

Writing 

Intent 

“You can make anything by writing.” – C.S. Lewis 

At All Saints, it is our intent for our children to receive a rich, comprehensive writing program, offering a range of opportunities to develop as fluent, enthusiastic, confident and able writers, who can write for purpose, effect, pleasure and to express themselves. We encourage and develop our children to be confident and competent writers who genuinely enjoy writing. 

 We aim for our children:

• to consider themselves as writers and to develop a love of writing, gaining pride in their written accomplishments. 

• to know how to plan, revise and evaluate their writing effectively. 

•to have sufficient control over the mechanics of writing to allow for skilful progression. 

•to embed basic skills in order to widen their knowledge of vocabulary and grammar. 

• to develop their writing so they are able to articulate, communicate and organise their ideas for the audience and purpose. 

Implementation 

At All Saints, writing is predominantly taught during daily English lessons, although application opportunities are incorporated throughout the whole curriculum, as well as through Big Write sessions. Throughout each unit of work, every opportunity for developing and utilising speaking and listening skills is planned for, writing is then developed using models as examples, looking at grammatical structures and vocabularly for writing and giving opportunities to use and apply skills through independent writing.

We utilise the different vehicles for teaching writing and ensure all our children have the opportunity to experience these in order for them to develop their skills. These include shared, guided and independent writing. 

Our children:

• experience a wide variety of high quality texts in order to stimulate, develop, appreciate and understand the purpose of writing. 

• are given the opportunity to write for real reasons, for different purposes and for a range of audiences. 

• are motivated to write through exciting and stimulating learning experiences that inspire the children’s imaginations including visitors into school, trips out of school, themed weeks

• are motivated and encouraged throughout our school to be adventurous with their vocabulary and take risks with their ideas.

• access spelling, punctuation and grammar lessons which underpin the writing process. Grammar lessons are taught within English lessons, spelling is taught discretely using the Twinkl spelling scheme. They follow the outcomes expected for each year group.

• are given opportunities to develop and discover the links between the skills of writing, reading, speaking and listening, drama and role play. 

• are encouraged to understand the power and influence of language and how it changes and develops over time and throughout the world.

• have the conventions of written and spoken Standard English modelled for them by all adults within school in order for them to develop their own abilities in Standard English

• have available a wide range of resources that they are taught and supported to use to enable them to become independent writers including dictionaries, thesauruses, working walls, word mats 

• are taught editing and proof reading as skills in themselves.

• have the opportunities to develop and apply their skills throughout the whole curriculum in an engaging and enjoyable way

• have the opportunity to share and celebrate their work with their peers in class or throughout the school.