Overview
High-quality texts are at the centre of teacher’s English planning. Teachers plan their English lessons using a variety of teaching styles, including collaborate work, paired work and independent work. Lots of activities are practical and engaging and designed to spark a love of reading and writing. We also endeavour to identify cross-curricular links with our History, Geography and Science topics where appropriate and purposeful.
Reading begins with teaching children to decode words quickly and easily using phonic knowledge. We use the Jolly Phonics teaching programme of Systematic Synthetic Phonics, to do this. When children are confident decoders, we gradually introduce more complex reading texts to help them develop their comprehension skills. Children are taught to read using a variety of methods, including individual, group and whole-class shared reading. Throughout school though, we use the ‘VIPERS’ method which covers the six main reading skills of: Vocabulary, Inference, Prediction, Explaining, Retrieval and Summarising.
We encourage children to become familiar with a variety of genres and authors and explore traditional tales as well as newly released titles. Our school library and classrooms have a range of poetry, playscripts, information books and stories to choose from.
See https://www.booksfortopics.com/yeargroups for more information about the books we choose to include in our class and school libraries.
Writing skills are taught in a progressional way, focusing on handwriting, spelling and punctuation and grammar. All year groups are given plenty of opportunities to create their own pieces of writing, and are increasingly taught to create pieces of writing from different genres.
We use the BBC Bitesize Grammar resources to support our planning and delivery of spelling, punctuation and grammar throughout school.
See the Key Stage links for more information:
KS1 - https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/topics/zkxxsbk
KS2 - https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/topics/zhrrd2p
In addition we are exploring new ways of teaching spelling including an online programme Emile https://emile-education.com/for-teachers/spelling-scheme-of-work/
