English

We place a big emphasis on developing basic skills early and on ensuring children have well developed literacy skills; reading, writing, speaking and listening.

Phonics

In Foundation and Key Stage 1 we follow the Supersonic Phonic Friends scheme. It is an approach to teaching phonics in which individual letters or letter sounds are blended to form groups of letters or sounds. Those groups are then blended to form complete words. Each individual letter or letter sound has an action to help children remember the letter sound. The scheme is divided into phases which begin in Nursery. Each phase builds on the skills and knowledge of previous learning. There are no big leaps in learning. Children have time to practise and rapidly expand their ability to read and spell words.

Our daily phonics sessions in Nursery,  Reception and Key Stage 1 are fun, involving lots of speaking, listening and games. The emphasis is on children’s active participation. They learn to use their phonic knowledge for reading and writing activities and in their independent work.

They are also taught to read and spell ‘tricky words’ – words with spellings that are unusual or that children have not yet been taught. eg ‘to’, ‘was’, ‘said’ and ‘the’ – you cannot really break the sounds down for such words. It is better to just ‘recognise’ them. 

Reading

Reading is fundamental to education. Proficiency in reading, writing and spoken language is vital for pupils’ success. Through these, they develop communication skills for education and for working with others: in school, in training and in life beyond school. At Wes Street we focusus on the teaching of reading through a whole class teaching approach. From Years 1 to 6, pupils take part in whole class reading sessions. In Key Stage 1, there are a minimum of  3x 20 minute whole class reading sessions a week. In Key Stage 2, this increases to a minimum of 3x 30 minute sessions. These are separate to, but may complement, English lessons. 

During whole class reading sessions, children are explicitly taught the skills of reading (outlined in the National Curriculum and the KS1 and KS2 test domains) through the use of VIPERS with the ultimate aim of teaching reading comprehension skills and building pupil confidence. The Reading Vipers are used by both KS1 and KS2 with a little adaption. The main difference being in the S.   In KS1 this stands for sequence and in KS2 it stands for summarise.

Children read during these sessions in a variety of different ways. They may hear the teacher model fluent reading and then have time to reread the same extract themselves, they may read individually and feedback, work in groups, take turns in pairs or read aloud to the their peers. You may see a number of these different strategies during one session. 

During these reading sessions, in most cases, an individual copy of each text is provided for every child. During each term, children will also have the opportunity to study non-fiction, poetry, songs, picture books and short films to ensure children get access to a wide range of high quality text types. Types of text given are appropriate to the age and Key Stage of the children.

Pleasure for reading

Writing

By the end of Primary School, we want our children to be excited about writing, producing work with confidence, fluency and understanding. Writing is a life skill that children need to be able to fully achieve their potential, no matter what their aspirations are. By linking our writing to reading and a love of books, children develop their interest in words and their meanings, growing a rich vocabulary.

Every child plans, drafts and revises their own writing. Children learn the skills of editing, which teaches them that they can always improve but also gives them the resilience to do so. Drama and role play are used regularly to encourage greater creativity and engagement. We have developed our curriculum to incorporate high quality and engaging texts that interest and inspire our writers. This is developed further in most cross-curricular work where children are given opportunities to use their writing skills to engage and inform. Progression is carefully planned, reviewed and adapted yearly to ensure that children’s learning builds effectively over time. Children should develop skills in speaking, listening, reading and writing to enable them to express themselves creatively and imaginatively, and to communicate with others effectively.

In Writing lessons we follow the scheme ‘Power of Reading’ which is reading focussed; children will read a book half termly and their writing work will be focussed around that. This gives children the opportunity to write with purpose but also with excitement. This class novel, when appropriate, will also link with other curricular subjects, enabling children to see that subjects can be integrated within each other. Cross curricular writing also enables children to see the importance of writing across all subjects. 

In EYFS children are taught to write their own first name and surname. Early on in Reception we teach children to say a sentence aloud, remember the sentence and then write their sentence down on paper. In addition children focus on learning letter formation, initial sounds in words and how to hold a pencil correctly. 

Children are taught grammar, punctuation and spelling within and in addition to the daily Writing lessons. These follow the expectations for each year group, as published in the National Curriculum. In Grammar lessons we use resources from Grammarsaurus. Certain skills, such as accurate spelling and understanding the morphology of words are vital as the children progress, becoming more able writers. West Street uses the scheme ‘Spelling Shed’ to enable all spelling rules for each year group to be taught throughout the year. Teachers use a range of strategies to help children learn and practise their spellings. Alongside this, children are tested on the common exception words for the year group they are working at. They are assessed every half term. Children apply their growing knowledge of grammar, punctuation and spelling to each piece of written work. Staff plan for the children to they have regular opportunities to write and across the curriculum to utilise the skills they have developed within their Writing lessons. During the writing process, children use a visual success criteria which includes spelling, punctuation and grammar objectives previously taught for that writing genre, this makes children more focussed. Children are able to self-assess at the end against the visual success criteria and then staff also mark against it. Children are then rewarded for objectives met and they can also clearly see their achievements as well as their next steps which are highlighted.

At West Street we also believe that children should feel proud of their work and should take ownership of it. To be able to achieve this, handwriting is also a priority. In EYFS and Key Stage 1 children are taught letter formation and in Key Stage 2 children are taught how to join up. We follow the ‘Nelson Handwriting’ scheme for this.