English – Phonics, Reading and Writing – Myddle CE Primary and Nursery School

‘If you just communicate you get by, if you communicate skilfully, you can CREATE miracles’

English Intent Statement:

At Myddle CE Primary School, we teach English by following The Literacy Tree Literary Curriculum . The Literary Curriculum is a complete, thematic, book-based approach to the teaching of primary English that places children’s literature at its core. The Literary Curriculum immerses children in a literary world, therefore creating strong levels of engagement to provide meaningful and authentic contexts for primary English. The scheme enables children to become critical readers and acquire an authorial style as they encounter a wide-range of significant authors and a variety of fiction, non-fiction and poetry texts.

At the heart of the scheme are books. Throughout the school, children in each class explore a range of literary texts and experience unique and significant authors as they move through each year group. At Myddle, the Literacy Tree texts for both writing and reading are mapped out to ensure progression and National Curriculum coverage across all year groups.

The Literary Curriculum provides complete coverage of all National Curriculum expectations for writing composition, reading comprehension, grammar, punctuation and vocabulary.

At Myddle, there is a strong emphasis on the teaching of early reading, phonics and spelling throughout the school and additional sessions are delivered separately to English lessons.

Phonics:

At Myddle, we strive to teach children to read effectively and quickly using the Read Write Inc. Phonics programme (RWI). This includes the teaching of synthetic phonics, sight vocabulary, decoding and encoding words as well as spelling and accurate letter formation.

We strongly believe that teaching children to read and write independently, as quickly as possible is imperative. These skills are not only fundamental but hold the keys to the rest of the curriculum. They also have a huge impact on children’s self-esteem and future life chances.

Using the RWI phonics program we teach children to:

read easily, fluently and with good understanding
develop the habit of reading widely and often, for both pleasure and information
write clearly, accurately and coherently, adapting their language and style in and for a range of contexts, purposes and audiences

In practice, children learn the 44 common sounds in the English language and are taught how to blend these sounds to decode (read) words. We start by teaching children to read and blend the first thirty Set 1 sounds. Once they have conquered this skill, they start reading stories and texts that have words made up of the sounds they know. This means that they can embed and apply their phonic knowledge and start to build their reading fluency. Once secure, children learn Set 2 and Set 3 sounds and then read texts with increasingly more complex sounds and graphemes. Throughout this process there is a focus on comprehension, reading with expression and reading for enjoyment.

Children are taught in small groups across the foundation stage and Key stage 1, which reflect their phonic knowledge and reading fluency. Children are regularly assessed so that they are taught in a RWI group which matches their current knowledge. We make sure that pupils read books that are closely matched to their increasing knowledge of phonics and ability to read ‘tricky words’; so they experience early reading success and gain confidence that they are readers.

Ways to help at home:

Read to them and always discuss the story you are reading to try to build your child’s comprehension skills, inference and understanding.
Practice the sounds they know at home. These are the sounds in the Speed Sound Chart at the start of the storybooks.
Listen to your child read, both their RWI storybook and other storybooks, every day. Make sure that your child brings their RWI Storybook into school every day!
Talk to them! The most important thing you can do is to talk to your child and listen to them when they are talking to you. Try to extend their vocabulary range and their skill at talking in increasingly more complex sentences. For example, try to teach them alternative words for ideas, or nouns they already know.

Below are some useful documents:

Reading at Home Booklet

RWI- Expectations

RWI – Sounds for parents

Phonics sounds Yr 1 and Yr 2

RWI – sound mat and red word lists

Fred Games

The Magic of Stories

You can also visit the parent portal on the RWI website for further information, top tips and techniques. Use the link below:

RWI Parent information

We closely measure progress with teachers drawing upon observations and continuous assessments to ensure children are stretched and challenged, as well as identifying children who may need additional support. Additionally, teachers carry out our individual phonics assessments formally three times a year in Year R and 1 to ensure that the children are ready for the Year 1 Phonics Screening. Children who do not pass the screening in Year 1 have focused intervention in Year 2 and staff continue to use our phonics assessment with these pupils. Further up the school, phonics continues for those who still need additional help. This is done through continued teaching according Phonics teaching and through the Toe-by-Toe, SNIP and Apples and Pears with skilled teaching assistants in small groups or on a 1:1 basis.

The teaching of other imperative reading skills such as retrieval and inference is taught through guided reading sessions in class. In these sessions, and with all texts used in class, stories, poems and non-fiction are chosen to develop pupils’ vocabulary, language comprehension and love of reading.

Reading Intent Statement:

Myddle CE Primary School is passionate about reading!

Literary Leaves- Reading

We use the Literary Leaves (part of the Literary Curriculum) for the teaching of Reading from Years 1-6. The scheme provides a range of sequenced activities that take children through whole books to teach reading comprehension and create critical readers. Literary Leaves use novels, poetry collections and high-quality, non-fiction books that connect to the Writing Roots through Literary Themes.

Implementation:

At Myddle, the teaching of guided reading is broken down into Years 1 and 2, year 3 and 4 and Years 5 and 6 following the Literacy Tree scheme (Literary Leaves). By using the Literary Leaves, teachers follow a book based comprehension resource, which is delivered to the whole class. The texts are carefully chosen for each class with specific content in mind. As a result, the scheme not only promotes high levels of engagement and thorough understanding but it also allows children to become critical readers.

Developing a love for Reading

We have a well-loved library area in the school, where children can come and borrow books of their choice. Older children take on the role of librarians and encourage other to love and respect books and reading. We are part of the Shropshire Library Gold service and through this, we are able to access e-readers, story sacks and other high quality resources to enhance our reading provision. Our fiction book stock is shared between the classes. Most non-fiction is classified and held in the central library. Children are encouraged to take reading material home each day and to use a home/school diary to record their reading.

Children are allocated their own reading book which is matched to their individual level of reading. This book can be taken home to read and shared with family members and pupils are also given the opportunity to read independently at school at various times during the week.

Buddy Reading

Each week, children pair up with a child from a different class/ year group to read to each other. This is valuable time of the week where children can support each other in their reading. It also gives all children a 1:1 reading opportunity where they can be inspired by their peers at school.

Reading Exchange

We also have a reading exchange storage unit outside of the school building on the playground where children can swap and take home additional books to read and share with family members.

Reading in class

At Myddle, we also believe that it is important for the children to be exposed to a range of high quality texts and for adults to model reading to them. Each class therefore has a class text, selected from Pie Corbett’s reading spine (see links below), which is read each day for at least 10 minutes.

Pie Corbett says…

Great books build the imagination. The more we read aloud expressively, and the more children are able to savour, discuss and reinterpret literature through the arts, the more memorable the characters, places and events become, building an inner world. A child who is read to will have an inner kingdom of unicorns, talking spiders and a knife that cuts into other worlds. The mind is like a ‘tardis’; it may seem small but inside there are many mansions. Each great book develops the imagination and equips the reader with language.

Great stories speak to us as individuals and some children will return to certain books again and again. Great stories also build our language because around 75 per cent of our vocabulary comes from our reading. Reading develops the ability to think in the abstract; to follow lines of thought. Schools that have a reading spine, build a common bank of stories that bind the community together. These are shared and deeply imagined common experiences.

The Reading Spine:

Pie-Corbett-nursery

Pie-Corbett-reception

Writing Intent Statement:

Writing Roots- Writing

The book-based Writing Roots are sequences of texts and themes, which are based on a wide range of high quality and significant children’s literature chosen to engage, challenge and support children to be critical readers and confident and informed writers. All National Curriculum requirements of grammar, spelling, vocabulary, literary language and composition are embedded leading towards a variety of purposeful and exciting shorter, longer and extended writing outcomes where the audience and purpose is clear.

Our writing curriculum aims to:

Deliver daily writing sessions based on the EYFS framework and ‘Writing Roots’writing scheme.
Create opportunities for children write daily and encourage children to apply their writing skills across the curriculum.
Assess writing after each writing unit to monitor and track progress. This is moderated by English leaders across the federation.
Encourage a neat, joint and fluent style of handwriting. The School follows the ‘Nelson’ handwriting scheme. Good presentation is expected. Children have the opportunity to earn a pen licence.
Ensure children are educated with specific spelling rules in a taught session. Children are provided with additional support when necessary. Spellings are differentiated by rule and the need of the individual.

Implementation:

At Myddle, In school, children are given the opportunity to cover a whole range of different genres focussing on high quality texts. We follow ‘The Writing Roots’ scheme from year 1 onwards to develop children’s vocabulary and writing through a thematic teaching of writing. Children look at a range model texts from an early age and are able to identify the key features of that particular piece of writing. Children’s work is shared on a whole school ‘Star Writers’ displays, which evidences the progression of writing across the school. Where possible, texts link to the topic we are covering in school at that point. Children complete an independent write at the end of each unit based on the text they are studying and the genre they have been covering.

Drawing Club – Reception

In Reception, teachers are specifically trained to teach early writing through a scheme called ‘Drawing Club’.

Drawing Club is a true adventure and perfect for Reception. Based around the golden blend of picture books, tales and animations, it involves a short period of time together as a whole class followed by time with children to allow them to explore their ideas and creativity. Drawing Club puts creativity at the centre of the teaching and allows the freedom of adventure to bring the world of story to life.

The scheme aims to:

Immerse children in the world of story and show them the joy of who you are
Share a treasure trove of vocabulary with children to open up the playground of language to them
Develop the opportunity to create a library of progress that can be astonishing
Develop children’s creativity and imagination to show them that they are extraordinary
Give children age-appropriate practice that is highly engaging and grounds children in the joy of books.

Writing Assessment:

Writing is assessed termly. Independent writing produced across the term is assessed against specific assessment criteria.

Spelling:

At Myddle, we follow the Twinkl spelling scheme which covers the statutory requirements of the national curriculum. Along with teaching new spelling rules it also revisits previously learnt spelling rules too.

Each week a new spelling rule is introduced to each year group through a 20 minute session. The rules are then put into practise and reinforced through a range of activities such as, handwriting, word searches, cross words, spelling games and investigations over the remainder of the week.

Support for Spelling

Children that are falling behind in spelling are supported through additional interventions, spelling support in class and personalised spelling lists. Children use programmes such as SNIP and additional phonics sessions to help close the gaps in their spelling.

Speaking Listening

The development of speech and language is identified as one of the most important parts of our EYFS curriculum. Staff work closely with parents/carers and previous nurseries to ensure they are extending and building on the language acquisition necessary.

The promotion, and use of, an accurate and rich cross-curricular vocabulary throughout school is planned and assessed in specific subjects.

A wide range of opportunities to use and develop their speaking and listening skills is planned for. These then feed into the writing process.

Other Documents:

Whole School Mixed Age Curriculum Map

Year 1 and 2 Curriculum Map

Year 3 and 4 Curriculum Map

Year 5 and 6 Curriculum Map

Literacy Tree Steps in Progression

PRIMARY National Curriculum

DFE Phonics Assessment Information