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English

Reading is of crucial importance and we adopt a variety of approaches to teach the necessary skills to read fluently and for meaning.  The children read both individually and in groups when the children share a book together and discuss story, plot, characters etc.  Parental involvement is key to developing the child’s confidence and enjoyment of reading and children take books from the reading scheme and library books home regularly to share with an adult.  Parents of reception children are invited to a meeting with their child’s teacher at which our approach to reading and our phonic approach to teaching letter sounds is shared.

We encourage the children to write in order to express their feelings and ideas and to pass on information.  We focus on neat presentation and correct grammar and punctuation.  Good spelling is encouraged by developing knowledge of word patterns and families and through using dictionaries.  Regular handwriting practice encourages a legible, fluent style of joined -up writing.

In teaching English we try to give each child as many opportunities as possible to develop an effective use and understanding of language according to their age – for example, by explaining how a model was designed and built, telling a story clearly, reading silently, aloud for pleasure or information, writing a report of a science experiment, making notes by skim-reading text, using technology.

Our phonics teaching is structured around Little Wandle Revised which is an SSP DfE accredited scheme of work.  We follow a banded reading scheme in which each band contains a new level of challenge in both decoding, prosody and comprehension for the reader.  The children’s reading books are fully decodable and matched to their phonic ability until the children have secure knowledge and understanding of phase 5 phonics.  The books are taken from a variety of sources such as Little Wandle Revised Collins Big Cat books (Phase 2-5) and include fiction and non-fiction texts.  Other publishers include Oxford Reading Tree and Rigby Rockets.