English Overview

Reading - Reading is taught as a priority through school, we strongly believe as a staff that the quicker children learn to read the better their future outcomes, and the easier they can access the rest of the curriculum.  In FS1 there is a big focus on communication and language to ensure that when the children leave FS1 they have strong language comprehension ready to start to learn phonics in FS2.   This is done through well timed incidental opportunities in continuous provision as well as well planned and purposefully selected tasks.  Children share a book on a one to one basis with an adult once a week, as well as having a daily story and access to books throughout the day.   In FS2 phonics is taught using RWI, this continues through to year one and year two when needed.   As well as the daily discrete phonics lesson, reading comprehension and vocabulary is also taught, this is done through sharing a class story each day, through literacy tasks and through other subjects.   Once children have completed RWI phonics they move onto guided reading to continue to develop their comprehension skills and to practise their decoding and fluency.  Children through school access a very rich reading curriculum.  Each day a child will access a phonics lesson, guided reading or cracking reading session, literacy lesson, class story and they will be practising their reading throughout other subjects.  We seek every available opportunity for children to apply and practise their reading skills.   We have a carefully planned list of books for each year group which has been devised using the recommended reads from cornerstones (to go with the topics), a selection of key authors and classic books and the recommended reads from the Pie Corbett reading spine.  We have also taken into account the lexile value of these books to ensure challenge at the right level.   

Writing - In the foundation stage mark making is available throughout all of the continuous provision, in each phonics lesson children are taught to encode as well as decode.  They then move onto using talk for writing as a vehicle for helping children use their encoding skills in a more purposeful way and to explore a range of genres and text types.   In year two and key stage two, children use cracking writing to further deepen their understanding of a text type before writing their own.    Therefore they would carry out a comprehension on the text type to ensure their understanding and check for unknown vocabulary followed by two / three days analysing this at text, language and sentence level.   As a school we have mapped out the genres covered in each group to ensure that children are regularly exposed to a range of writing and also have the opportunity to apply these skills again to practise and improve on the work they did before.   Children also have the opportunity to practise their writing in all other subjects.   Spelling is taught using RWI which the children start once they have completed RWI phonics.  Grammar is taught using the skills builders units and books. 

The more that you read, the more that you will know.  The more that you learn, the more places you'll go.  Dr Seuss.

Reading is like breathing in; writing is like breathing out. Pam Allyn