Speaking and Listening

We want our children to become confident in their communication skills. We encourage them to communicate clearly, describe accurately and to ask questions. We provide lots of opportunities through drama, assemblies, presentation and discussion. It is important to encourage children to develop their listening skills and to enjoy listening in a range of different situations. We ask them to follow instructions, convey messages and follow ideas raised in group discussion with understanding and interest. Speaking and listening encompasses all areas of our curriculum.

Reading

We place great emphasis upon reading and provide the children with a range of books and other reading materials to support this. We want them to read fluently and with understanding so that reading becomes a real source of enjoyment and pleasure. We have daily phonics teaching groups in school to encourage them to practise and develop a range of skills. We monitor your child’s progress through an extensive range of available reading material to ensure that they reach their full potential. Each teacher will keep a detailed record of your child’s reading progress and achievement and will set targets with them. We encourage and welcome support from home with the reading process.

Writing

Children are encouraged to express themselves by writing in different contexts and for a variety of purposes and audiences. We will develop children’s creativity, imagination, vocabulary, spelling and handwriting through the teaching of writing. We will do this through modelling good practice, using good examples and setting writing targets to aid self-improvement. We give each child the opportunity to discuss and assess their own writing and the work of others.

Handwriting is a skill which can only be improved by constant practice. We have regular handwriting practice sessions and we support the development of this skill across the writing opportunities provided by the curriculum.

Phonics

Phonics is the knowledge of how the alphabetic sounds work and how these sounds are combined to correspond to the spoken word. Phonemes are the sounds made by blending letters to correspond to the spoken word and graphemes are the written equivalent of the phonemes.

Through Phonics we aim:

• To deliver a high quality, systematic phonic programme that is fast, focused, frequent and fun.
• To enable children to start learning phonic knowledge and skills as soon as they begin school with the expectation they will become fluent readers, having secured word building and recognition by the end of Key stage 1.
• To teach the children to apply the skill of blending phonemes in order to read words.
• To teach the children to apply the skill of segmenting words into phonemes in order to spell words.
• To ensure that children apply phonic knowledge as their first approach to reading and spelling, even though all words do not conform to regular phonic patterns.
• To ensure children are taught tricky words that do not conform to regular phonic patterns.
• To encourage children to attempt to spell words for themselves, within the range of their phonic knowledge by building an individual repertoire and the confidence and strategies to attempt the unfamiliar.

For further information on our phonics click here