Intent:
English has four key strands: spoken language, reading, writing and spelling, vocabulary, grammar and punctuation. The curriculum is designed to teach pupils how to speak and write fluently so that they can effectively communicate their ideas and emotions to others. The overarching aim of the reading curriculum is to ensure children acquire the necessary skills and strategies to read a range of texts with understanding and enjoyment. Through reading in particular, pupils have a chance to develop culturally, emotionally, intellectually and spiritually.
Implementation:
Phonics
Read, Write, Inc. Phonics is used as the main scheme for teaching phonics in school. Read, Write, Inc. Phonics is a rigorous and dynamic synthetic phonics programme aimed at creating fluent and enthusiastic readers, confident speakers and willing writers. Children are taught the individual sounds first through a picture the same shape as the letter, for example for ‘a’ there is a picture of an apple and ‘s’ is a picture of a snake. These are called ‘speed sounds’ because we want your children to read them effortlessly. There are 3 sets of sounds. Set 1 contains all of the letters in the alphabet. The first 6 sounds taught are m, a, s, d, t, i, n. Once your child knows these sounds they can start learning to blend the sounds together to read words.
Reading
At Lumley Infant and Nursery School, we believe that all pupils should have access to a wide range of texts and genres to develop their vocabulary, language comprehension and love of reading across the whole curriculum. Pupils are familiar with and enjoy listening to a wide range of stories, poems, rhymes and non-fiction texts. We promote a love of reading through our inviting class story corners, author visits, regular book fairs and whole class story time sessions.
Every week, pupils have a timetabled guided reading session in school with their teacher, where they have the opportunity to share a text within a small group. This is lead by the class teacher, who supports pupils to develop a range of skills to develop reading accuracy and fluency. Teacher’s also focus on developing pupil’s comprehension skills, fluency and love of reading. The text provided is always closely matched to children’s reading and phonic ability and is also sent home each week for children to practice. Read Write Inc. is the main reading scheme that is utilised in school as it is well matched to the phonics scheme taught. However, we have an abundance of reading schemes available in school, which are used to give children breadth and depth to their reading.
Every week, pupils are given time to select a library book that they can take home to share with their family. This book is not matched to the children’s reading ability. The purpose of library books is to develop children’s love for reading and to equip all families to a have the opportunity to share a wealth of stories and non-fiction text with their children at home. The importance of reading aloud to children is promoted with parents and carers throughout the school year.
Writing
Through direct teaching, explicit adult modelling and a wealth of opportunities to write for different purposes, pupils are able to use and apply their writing skills across the whole curriculum. Mastering the basics of writing a sentence is a focus within Early Years and Key Stage One, progressing from being able to articulate a sentence orally, remembering it correctly and then being able to replicate it in writing accurately. A sentence mantra, using symbols, provides pupils with a pictorial representation of what they need to include to write a perfect sentence:
Once pupils have mastered this skill, they are then supported to enhance and embellish their writing by using ‘second tier’ vocabulary, writing more complex sentences and longer pieces and experimenting with a wider range of punctuation.
READING – Knowledge and Key Skills
WRITING – Knowledge and Key Skills
Parent Guide
Please read our ‘Parent’s Guide to Developing Early Reading and Writing Skills’ leaflet below for further information on our approaches to teaching phonics, reading and writing.
Parent’s Guide to Developing Early Reading and Writing Skills 2021
