English
English is a vital part of the curriculum and impacts all other subjects. Children are taught effective communication skills through speaking and listening, as well as reading and writing. Reading and writing go hand in hand; great writers need to read a range of genres to give them a broad range of vocabulary and ideas to use within their own writing. We aim to inspire children to read and write independently, skilfully and for enjoyment! We are passionate about giving children the fundamental skills to let them achieve later in life.
Reading
We are very enthusiastic about reading and work hard to foster a lifelong love of books across the school. We believe reading is both purposeful (for gaining information) and pleasurable, and we continually share our love of stories while promoting a positive reading culture.
To read effectively, children need to develop two equally important skills: decoding (working out what the print on the page says) and comprehension (understanding what those words mean).
We teach reading in a variety of ways:
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Daily phonics and reading sessions, planned using the Little Wandle scheme, are taught in the Early Years and continue through to Year 2. This support is extended further up the school if individual children still need it.
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Each class has a daily English lesson using high-quality texts, carefully chosen as part of our curriculum, to underpin the development of reading and writing skills.
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We use the VIPERS approach to practise and develop key reading skills:
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Vocabulary
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Inference
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Prediction
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Explaining
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Retrieval
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Summarising
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We place high value on reading aloud, and children in all year groups are heard reading regularly by adults in school.
Our school libraries have recently been audited and refreshed with a wide selection of wonderful, high-quality books to both inspire and challenge our readers. Every child from Reception to Year 6 has:
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A banded book matched to their current reading ability (see book banding document below), and
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A 'reading for pleasure' book they have chosen from the library.
We strongly encourage parents to hear their child read at home regularly across all age groups. Asking questions about the text not only supports fluency but also builds vital comprehension skills. We support parents by running workshops to offer guidance on how to support their children with reading at home.
We believe children should encounter print in a wide range of formats – not just books, but also magazines, comics, menus, signs, food labels, and more. The broader the experience, the better!
Writing
Writing involves many elements such as forming ideas into sentences, spelling, handwriting and understanding grammar and punctuation.
It begins with a strong focus on talk and a strong focus on phonics. Children are given opportunities to work on speaking in sentences, telling stories, explaining and justifying their ideas and building their vocabulary. They work daily on recognising the sounds that letters and groups of letters make and playing segmenting and syllable games. We encourage children to have confidence to make independent choices and believe they are writers and value their first attempts. The first step is mark making – exciting places are set up to encourage children to want to write such as trays of glitter, water on outdoor paving slabs, cars in paint, etc. This develops into letters, words and sentences as children’s learning grows. As we give them steps to help them improve, their skills grow. Phonics is taught in discrete sessions daily and applied in English lessons. Children are also taught to spell irregular common words known as high frequency words. The current English National Curriculum includes a focus on grammar, and children are taught grammar from the very beginning of school. We teach these skills and then apply it within our writing lessons. Correct letter formation pencil grip and handwriting are also modelled throughout the school using the bubble handwriting approach. We also do activities which build up the children's fine motor skills in order to develop much needed muscles for writing.
In EYFS and KS1, we use 'Drawing Club' and 'Curious Quests' to capture children’s imagination and spark their creativity. Through these immersive experiences, children explore the joy and magic of stories while developing key SPaG skills to help them complete their daily quests. Alongside nurturing a love of storytelling, they strengthen their fine motor skills, build ambitious vocabulary, and develop essential foundations for writing.. Children in each class work on writing different genres such as instructions, simple poems, narrative and non-fiction reports.
In Key Stage two, children learn even more genres such as mystery stories, plays, myths, shape poems and biographies. Children learn to improve the quality of their sentences by playing with clauses, an increased range of conjunctions, adverbial phrases, more complex sentence structures and experimenting with more complex punctuation. Phonics teaching migrates to teaching more combinations of letter patterns, along with spelling rules for which words use which, and increased rules for adding prefixes and suffixes (outlined in detail below.).
Spelling
KS2 children use a sounds and syllables approach to spelling. Sound & Syllables teaches children how to spell by building upon what children already know and understand from phonics teaching, the crucial relationship between sounds and spellings. The Sounds & Syllables sequence consists of five simple steps: (1) say the word clearly; (2) snip the word into syllables; (3) say the sounds and write the spellings for each syllable in turn; (4) think about challenging spelling patterns within the word; and (5) link these spellings to similar spellings in known words.