Our English curriculum was established in September 2016 to ensure that all the aims and objectives of the 2014 National curriculum are being fully met through an approach that is specifically designed to meet the strengths and needs of our pupils.
Reading is at the heart of everything that we do. We ensure that children read for pleasure in order to develop a lifelong love of reading. High quality and engaging texts with the appropriate level of challenge are also at the centre of all reading instruction and the driving force of all English planning for learning. Planning is inspired by the text; a text is not found to match the planning. We use the CLPE Power of Reading Teaching Sequences to support us.
READING FOR PLEASURE
Reading for pleasure is at the core of our reading curriculum. It is the entitlement of every child and we aim to foster desire and engagement in all our children. Children who choose to read, enjoy reading and read regularly reap the benefits academically, socially and in areas of health and well-being.
We do this through our ongoing work to develop:
*Teachers’ knowledge of children’s literature and other texts
*Teachers’ knowledge of children’s reading practices
*Reading for pleasure pedagogy: Social reading environments
Reading aloud
Independent reading
Informal book talk, inside text talk and recommendations
*Reading teachers (teachers who read and readers who teach)
*Reading communities (in classes, in school, in their homes and in the wider community)
READING INSTRUCTION
Our English curriculum ensures BOTH decoding and comprehension skills are well established, embedded and balanced in line with the National Curriculum expectations in Early Years, Key Stage 1 and Key Stage 2.
Modelled and Shared Reading
Modelled and shared reading enables the children to be ACTIVE readers – the voice inside the reader’s head is active in the moment of reading. The teacher models this voice while reading one text to engage all pupils and develop all areas of comprehension simultaneously. They are all linked together and can’t be separated.
One full lesson is completed in every class every week consistently across the school.
CLPE Core Books gives suggested texts for each year group.
After developing a deep level of comprehension through the whole class and group work, the children evidence this in their English books by completing a differentiated independent task based on the reading domain question stems to ensure balance, rigour and high expectations. The picture of the relevant animal must be next to each part of the task as the learning objective and will then be highlighted in line with the marking policy. These will be targeted in line with the previous term’s PIRA assessment question type analysis.
Guided Reading
Guided reading sessions are led by the class teacher. The children work in ability groups and have one session each week in which they apply the strategies that they have learnt in Modelled and Shared Reading to a new text with more independence.
A Collins Big Cat book from the correct year group band is used in order to evidence the child as a reader who is meeting year group expectations.
A three step approach is used.
Individual Reading
Parents record home reading in the children’s planner. This allows an ongoing communication between home and school to develop and support the children’s reading.
*Please support your child to read every day at home.
*To build up fluency and stamina from Year 2, try to read one chapter or story at a time.
*Ask questions about what your child has read and talk about it together to make sure that he/she has understood it well.
*Please record the page number in your child’s diary after every read.
Reception, Year 1 and Year 2 follow Letters and Sounds. Children in Reception and Year 1 have a Floppy’s Phonics reading book that matches the phase that they are working in. This allows the children to apply their current and previous learning without having to deal with words and graphemes that they have not yet learnt. In Year 2, when they complete Phase 5 and pass the phonics screening test, they no longer need these books and they are ready to read from the sets of orange, purple, turquoise, gold and white banned books in line with the KS1 assessments.
Accelerated Reader
In September and at the end of each half term, the children complete a Star Test.
The result of the Star Test sets each child’s individual target for the following half term. This is tracked as a percentage of the whole target. Progress towards 100% is shown on the each child’s AR home screen and on a display in each classroom (25%, 50%, 75%, 100%). Children who get to 100% will receive a certificate in assembly at the end of each half term.
The Star Test also sets each child’s individual ZDP range. Children use their ZDP range bookmarks and last quiz result to choose books independently (not colour bands). This is an ongoing assessment of performance to ensure that their book choice is always of the appropriate difficulty to maximise progress.
Each child has four 30 minute AR reading sessions a week. (The fifth session is Guided Reading with the class teacher.)
PHONICS
Our phonics programme follows Letters and Sounds using the Sound Start medium term planning, week and lesson structures, intervention programmes, parent workshops and pre-screening assessments by Alex Finn.
Class teachers use the medium term planning to complete their weekly planning which consists of two reading lessons, two spelling lessons and one common exception word lesson. These lessons each have five main parts: recognition and recall of GPCs, warm up activity, teach and demonstrate, practise and apply and plenary.
What a fantastic World Book Day we all had in school! We love books and all our learning is centred around them so to have a day just to celebrate reading is very special. Thank you to all our children and families for your hard work and creativity in putting together such wonderful costumes. The children were really excited to talk about the characters that they had chosen.
How creative the staff were too!
Each class learnt and performed a poem in our World Book Day Assembly. Well done to you all! You performed brilliantly.
Remember to take your book token to Sainsbury's, WHSmith or any book shop to buy one of the 12 special books written and published for World Book Day by famous authors such as Rick Riordan, Frank Cottrell-Boyce, Malorie Blackman, Jeff Kinney, Lauren Child and Alex T Smith.
Go onto the World Book Day website and enjoy the masterclasses, audiobooks and booklists on there.
We are very lucky to have such a fantastic children's library so close to us on The Green. We all visited it in the summer term and the librarians were delighted to see all the children. In the library, you can choose and borrow books for free as often as you like.
