English
English is celebrated and promoted across the school weekly, during our Celebration assemblies: Author of the Week and Star Reader. Additionally we will host special events and extracurricular activities such as World Book Day, The Get Caught Reading Challenge, Riddle of the Week, Author visits, Storyraiders, the Lancashire Fantastic Book Awards and Brilliant Book Awards. Children’s work is constantly showcased through our social media also.
WE LOVE TO READ!
Our children love to read and enjoy finding new authors to learn about. Some of their favourite authors are David Walliams, Roald Dahl, Tony Ross, JK Rowling, Cressida Cowell, Jeff Kinney, Tom Palmer and Liz Pichon amongst others…
Our children love taking part in the annual KS2 Fantastic Book Awards (Starbucks Club) reading x5 newly published books from up-and-coming authors. He are some snaps of the children’s favourite club! We also run the KS1 Brilliant Book Awards.
Twice a year, we invite the Book Fair into school, which is always a big success, with the children buying new book titles from existing and newly famed authors!
We are passionate about children learning to read at Park Primary School. Over the seven years that your child is in our care, we aim for them to develop a love of reading and books so that they move from learning to read to reading to learn – and reading purely for enjoyment too! We have two amazing Key Stage libraries stacked with a myriad of genres to engage the children.
Additionally, we promote reading for pleasure and understanding of texts digitally (we’re moving with the technological times) through the myON and Renaissance Learning websites. Our children, from Year 2 onwards, love completing the Accelerated Reader quizzes and are excited to get the word count for their class higher and higher!
Phonics
At Park, from the beginning of EYFS, we teach reading through a phonics approach. We use the validated Anima Phonics: Letters and Sounds Updated, which is a complete systematic synthetic phonics programme providing all the necessary resources and training to achieve outstanding results.
At the very beginning, the focus is on listening to and hearing sounds, rather than recognising the actual letters (graphemes), which come later. Our children have opportunities to explore different sounds in their environment, how to make and change sounds using musical instruments and create rhythms. This teaches them the pattern, pace and expression reading requires. Through listening, our children learn to link sounds and letters in the order they occur in words, as well as naming and sounding letters in the alphabet. Oral segmenting (breaking up letters in words) and blending (putting them back together) plays a huge part in the steps to teaching a child to read.
In Reception children learn to recognise 42 letter sounds (graphemes), read CVC words (ship, cat, hat, chop) by blending letters together, recognise ‘rainbow’ words, such as she, no, go, was, the and learn letter names. When they have achieved this, they begin to read short captions and simple sentences (The farmer gets up at six in the morning).
Additional phonics sessions are delivered to children who require additional support, once children are able to de-code, they are then ready to access reading books.
Our home reading books are linked directly to the child’s phonetical knowledge, which naturally progress across the academic year. Once the children are secure in the phonics’ knowledge (in Phase 5), they are then moved to the accelerated reader programme allowing them more free choice of books with their age range.
Phonics is assessed half-termly; any gaps in knowledge are addressed through interventions thereafter. Additionally, these interventions continue in Lower Key Stage 2 as required.
Reading
Reading in KS1
Reading continues with Anima Phonics where systematic, daily, discrete teaching takes place, with opportunities for the children to practice and apply their skills in the context of reading.
At this stage, we emphasise that reading for fluency is important, therefore by giving children opportunities to re-read familiar books, we build their confidence and they begin to feel like real readers!
By the end of Year 1, the Government require children to complete a phonics test. At Park Primary School, we take every measure to ensure that children are not worried about this test.
Reading in KS2
Within Key Stage 2, the emphasis shifts to reading for pleasure but also reading to learn. At this point, texts become longer and less familiar, reading becomes more fluent and the pace of reading is quickened. However, if children are not reading fluently, they will continue with phonics intervention and additional support with their reading.
Children are introduced to whole class reading which focuses on discussions, new vocabulary and broadens their comprehension skills. Core texts are carefully selected by class teachers to ensure they are accessible but challenging and give children the opportunity to explore a wide range of genre and authors.
We complete daily reading skills in Key Stage 2. A typical week will include:
Day 1 Reading and discussion
Day 2 Reading Domain written task
Day 3 Reading and discussion
Day 4 Reading Domain written task
Day 5 Cold Task Comprehension using LbQ (Learning by Questions)
Writing
Children will begin the EYFS with a wide variety of writing skills ranging from simply making marks to writing their own name unaided. They will move from gross to finer motor skills using a variety of tactile methods. They need opportunities to make marks in their own way and to gradually refine these into recognisable patterns and eventually individual letters.
All EYFS staff, including support staff, must be aware of directionality and when children are showing a firm interest in writing their name, they should be encouraged to use correct directionality.
To aid co-ordination, sand trays and sticks (or fingers), paper, paint and large brushes, modelling materials, blackboards and chalk may be used. They will be taught the use of capital letters for names and creating simple sentence by the end of the year.
In years 1 to 6, we follow the LCC (Lancashire County Council) ‘Talk for Writing’ planning and strategies which embeds as the name suggests writing outcomes through oracy. Our planning, across both key stages, promotes listening and speaking skills through action and dialogue.
A typical English unit of work will work through the ‘Reading’ phase, ‘Gathering Content’ phase and finally the ‘Writing’ phase with the intent to learn and consolidate all writing skills required to enable all children to confidently complete a writing piece linked to the relevant genre at the end of that unit.
Independent Writing
In preparation for written outcomes, linked in with our medium term plans, our teaching staff follow the shared write/independent write approach.
Our teachers will model shared writing: using ideas from the children, working wall, word-wheels (linkythinks) and other resources.
This shared write/independent write approach ensures the children have the required skills and knowledge to enable them to complete an independent write successfully.
In addition to this, the children use writing targets that are linked to the KLIPs skills as set out by LCC. The children will complete writing outcomes for an end of unit genre but also incidental writing opportunities that arise within a unit/text.
