Literacy, Phonics & Writing

Reading – Intent

Reading is at the heart of everything we do at Larwood School and forms the core of our curriculum. We intend to foster a love of reading for all and aim to equip our children with the necessary skills to read fluently and with confidence, both for pleasure and for purpose. Many of our pupils come to us unable to read or reading significantly below age-related expectations. We intend to encourage all pupils to read widely across both fiction and non- fiction in order to develop their knowledge and understanding of both themselves and the ever-changing world in which they live, to develop an appreciation and love of reading, to gain knowledge across the curriculum, and to develop their comprehension skills.

Implementation

Guided Reading Sessions

Children have a weekly fluency session where teachers focus on the key skills needed to become confident readers. We know that fluency is an important step between learning phonics and understanding what they read, so it’s taught clearly and directly.

In these sessions, we help children develop three parts of fluency: reading quickly and smoothly (automaticity), reading accurately, and reading with expression and natural rhythm (prosody)

Teachers and teaching assistants regularly check each child’s reading fluency and provide extra help to those who need it.

Impact

As a result of the high quality art curriculum the use of a full range of resources will increase the profile of art in the school. The learning environment will remain consistent throughout the school and community as we want to ensure art is loved by pupils and teachers. An integral part of the Art curriculum at Larwood School is for the children to understand what it means to be an ‘artist’.

Reading Books – At our school, we use a range of reading schemes to offer children a wide selection of quality texts. Over the years, we’ve built and updated these collections to give children a rich and diverse reading experience across all genres.

Our reading provision includes Oxford Reading Tree and three decodable book programmes: Raintree, Project X, and Code. We also use carefully chosen novels that teachers have banded.

All books are ‘book banded’ to ensure they provide the right level of challenge and support children’s progress.

Home Reading - All children are expected to take home a ‘banded reading book’ and read at least three times a week. Reading is to be recorded in the online reading diary which is shared as a link between home and the class team. All class teams are expected to write in children’s reading diaries each time the child reads.

Some of our children require an ‘early years’ approach to reading, in which case, each child is sent home with a fully decodable book containing the letter sounds and tricky words they are currently learning in their phonics sessions. The intention is that our children will be able to read books more confidently, using the phonemes they have learnt; this will also help parents to be more informed about the phonemes their child can recognise and use. Therefore, these books are selected by a trained teacher or teaching assistant to ensure books are pitched appropriately for each child.

Once a child has reached the ‘turquoise band’, when they are moving onto ‘Phase 6’, they will be able to select their own reading books as they will be able to fully decode and are ready to apply these skills to more challenging texts.

Children in Year 2 and any children in KS2, who have not passed their phonics screening test, will take home a fully decodable reading book

In Key Stage 2, children can select their own reading books; the reading bands they are selecting from are monitored regularly by the class teacher, using assessment and through listening to children read.

Individual Reading – 1:1 Daily Reading
All children will have the opportunity to read to a trained adult at least once a day through the essentials time. Children requiring additional support with their reading will have extra reading sessions with an adult or will be in a reading intervention led by a teacher or teaching assistant to address the required skills for them to make appropriate progress.

Class Readers - As a school, we are passionate about helping children to develop a love for reading. We believe this love for reading is a steppingstone to becoming an enthusiastic learner and a confident reader, writer and speaker. We also know how important it is to have good ‘role models’ in reading and that a great deal of enjoyment can come from listening to stories as well as learning. For this reason, we ensure our teachers read to our children daily.

Library - We are fortunate to have our own library and the children have the opportunity once a week to choose a book to take home to read for pleasure. The library is regularly updated with new books to ensure that the choice remains current, relevant and in condition.

Reading rich environments - We strive to create a stimulating and exciting reading environment that encourages a love for reading. Every classroom has a reading display which celebrates reading in the classroom and children have access to a reading area in which they can choose and borrow engaging and high-quality texts.

Reading culture - Throughout the year, we lead several initiatives that help to build up a stimulating and exciting reading culture throughout the school. These include: Half term reading challenges – supported via trained school staff over Teams, Reading to our school dog, Buddy, author visits and world book day.

Phonics

Phonics skills are actively taught daily throughout every year group as part of our essentials program. We use the phonics scheme based on use the 'Essential Letters and Sounds' a DfE validated systematic synthetic phonics programme. The scheme ensures that children are exposed to grapheme and phoneme correspondences in a systematic and progressive way. Children learn together through practice and application, initially learning to discriminate between different sounds (phonemes) and then increasingly being able to decide which letter combination to use to represent the sound, given the word and the position of the sound.

In Year 1 in the summer term, children are required by the DfE to undertake a phonics screening test. This is completed 1-to-1 with their teacher and is a familiar activity for the children. If children do not meet the required standard, they would be required to re-take in Class 2 (statutory process from DfE)

Please see the Policy for Teaching of Phonics at Larwood School for more information- this is attached as a document below.

Impact

Children leave Larwood with the ability to read widely and often, with fluency and comprehension appropriate to their age but most importantly, with the desire to read for pleasure. Children are able to use their learnt skills to apply their understanding when reading and engaging with a range of texts. Children enjoy reading, feel safe when reading, feel creative and inspired by the books, characters, and authors they encounter throughout their time at primary school. As a result of high-quality teaching and exposure to a diverse range of reading experiences, children achieve well; this is reflected in results from internal tests that meet government expectations and from listening to their reading and talking to children. As one Ofsted inspector was told by a pupil during the 2019 inspection, echoing the views of many, explained, ‘I didn’t used to be able to read, but now I can.’

Writing

Intent

At Larwood, we are dedicated to deliver an exciting, innovative English curriculum which enables and empowers children to become articulate speakers, inspired writers, and avid readers.

English is not just a daily discrete lesson but is at the cornerstone of the entire curriculum. It is embedded within all our lessons, and we strive for a high level of English for all. Through using high-quality texts, immersing children in vocabulary rich learning environments and ensuring new curriculum expectations and the progression of skills are met, the children are exposed to a rich, creative, and continuous English curriculum which will develop creative writing, purposeful speaking and listening and foster a love of reading for all.

Implementation

Writing

We believe that, in order to write high quality texts, children need to read high-quality texts. It is our intention to immerse pupils within a text for them to fully understand the vocabulary and structure of the story.

At Larwood, we teach writing by linking the writing to an exciting topic. Class teams work hard to ‘hook’ children by providing them with an introduction to a new topic that is exciting and engaging. Children participate in hands on, Stunning Starters, immersing in an experience that allows them to explore and investigate and consequently write with purpose. This model tracks throughout the term with other hands-on activities.

Children’s good work is published on Pobble.com. This encourages children to edit and make improvements to their writing as they take great pride in being published authors.

Writing

Be immersed within a quality text.
Be exposed to high quality texts including high level vocabulary.
Develop a range of methods to communicate their ideas to an audience.
Write from a range of genres across fiction, non-fiction, and poetry.
Write creatively drawing on their own ideas, interests, and experiences.
Write for a range of purposes.
Use writing to demonstrate their learning through cross-curricular writing.

Grammar

Grammar is taught through the essentials programme and within literacy lessons and this is made clear through grammar specific learning objectives.

Teachers plan sessions based on the whole school grammar progression which is taken from National Curriculum expectations for each year group. Children are then expected to apply their grammar knowledge throughout each piece of writing.

Grammar

At Larwood Primary School, spelling is a strong focus across the school with daily phonics sessions along with high frequency word and common exception word spellings addressed:

Learning year group appropriate common exception words
Revisiting last week’s spelling rule
Introducing a new spelling pattern for the week

Time to practise the new rule with a range of activities.

Daily dictation to encourage application.

The spellings being learnt by the children are taken from the National curriculum and cover all the spelling conventions, statutory spellings and common exception words that are required to be learnt throughout key stage 1 and 2.

These spelling lists are then tested the following week. Any spelling that a KS2 child spells incorrectly during the test is noted on a post-it note, and then the child has the opportunity to further practise these during afternoon essentials catch up. Children are encouraged to apply their previously learnt and current spelling rules throughout their writing and teachers’ address any errors being made in their marking comments.

Impact

The impact on our children is clear: progress, sustained learning and transferable skills. With the implementation of the writing journey being well established and taught thoroughly in both key stages, children are becoming more confident writers and by the time they are in upper Key Stage 2, most genres of writing are familiar to them, and the teaching can focus on creativity, writer’s craft, sustained writing and manipulation of grammar and punctuation skills.

As a result of high-quality teaching and immersion in high quality vocabulary, children achieve well; this is reflected in results from internal tests, book journeys and pupil and parent feedback. Many of our pupils come to us as highly reluctant writers and leave with the ability to write with meaning and purpose and the capacity to make themselves understood.

Children leave Larwood with an extensively improved vocabulary, a passion for writing and high aspirations to continue to grow and develop throughout their education.