Kilham Church Of England Voluntary Controlled Primary School

INTENT

At Kilham CE Primary School we aim to promote high standards of language and literacy. Throughout our English curriculum, we aim for all children to have a love of reading and writing, as we believe that this is vital in achieving success at school and later in life. In line with the national curriculum 2014, the curriculum at Kilham School aims to ensure that all pupils:

• For children to foster a love of reading and writing, and a recognition of their value.
• Ensure that children are taught to write through a variety of discreet and cross- curricular learning opportunities.
• To engaging, high quality rich-in-text books so that reading is an enjoyable and meaningful experience, along with using these texts to demonstrate and model a high standard of writing.
• Teach children a range of writing strategies, which will allow them to write in length and depth across the curriculum, be it narrative or non-fiction.
• Teach our children a range of reading strategies, which will allow them to tackle reading problems and the wider curriculum with confidence.
• Ensure that children are taught to read with fluency, accuracy and understanding through a variety of discreet and cross- curricular learning opportunities.
• Ensure our children have sound phonic awareness and use a phonics first approach to reading.
• Follow the genre progression throughout school so children are being taught a range of writing genres.
• Use reading as a fundamental part of all curriculum planning and development.

IMPLEMENTATION

Early literacy skills begin to be taught at the very start of a child’s journey at our school, starting in Nursery, where children are involved in lots of active and hands on speaking and listening activities which include singing, playing musical instruments and enjoying storybooks. This progresses on into Reception and further into Year 1 where the children are taught discrete daily Phonics lessons (using our validated systematic synthetic phonics programme: Little Wandle, Letters and Sounds Revised) which enables them to have the skills to start reading and writing.

English lessons are planned systematically as part of a themed approach, using our Cornerstones curriculum. The children are exposed to high quality examples of texts within a genre of writing then they explore the literary features used and build up to writing their own text for a purpose and audience. Children are also given the opportunity to edit and improve the writing that they produce by making better choices in their vocabulary, correcting grammatical errors and improving sentence structure or length- just like real authors do! Further writing work is completed throughout week in stand-alone ‘GPS’ lessons in order to expose children to all the grammar, punctuation and spellings that they are expected to learn within the national curriculum.

To promote the importance of reading within the school we have a book banded reading scheme that includes a range of genres in fiction, non-fiction and poetry titles. We also have a varied library for each key stage and also promote the use of the East Riding Library fiction and project boxes within our classrooms. Children are encouraged to read regularly to develop and encourage their enjoyment in reading, using our Reading Rockets challenge. Reading starts off being taught within Phonics lessons and then progresses through to being taught in Guided Reading sessions and Whole Class Reading sessions, where reading comprehension skills are practised and consolidated.

Vocabulary is taught in discrete sessions and within the English lessons where it is explored as part of the class text through the eyes of the reader or writer. Children are also encouraged to question what words mean when they come across a word that is unfamiliar during reading, class work or any other area. Key vocabulary is introduced at the start of a topic, for example in Science, History or Geography, to ensure pupils understand the meaning of these words. We get involved in a range of extra activities which are used to promote English within the school including: National Poetry Week, World Book Day and DEAR (Drop Everything and Read) weeks.

IMPACT

Through our curriculum, we encourage children to become engaged, enthusiastic, and confident about English. We measure our impact of our curriculum through the following methods:

• A range of Teacher assessment methods to judge a child’s progress and attainment in reading and writing.
• Half termly assessment of phonics
• A weekly spelling tests
• Termly reading and GPS assessments using standardised scores which enable the school to track

progress, predict future performance and benchmark against national averages.

• Statutory assessments at the end of KS1 and KS2
• Moderation of writing internally within our cluster schools.
• Pupil discussions about their learning