Reading and Writing

At Queensway, we want our pupils to be literate and confident speakers, readers and writers. Reading is at the heart of our curriculum; it is how children access knowledge across all subjects. We want to ensure that all children are avid readers who read for enjoyment. We encourage and support all children to read a variety of genres and authors and learn to use adventurous vocabulary in their speech and written work.

Curriculum

To this end, we make sure that children are given quality phonics teaching from Reception onwards using the Read Write Inc scheme. We have a large range of decodable texts for children to practise with and consolidate their reading at home. Our school library is well-used by children, and we have regular visitors from the local Grammar School to support with our reading acquisition.

Children read at home with parents with a range of books which are logged on Boom Reader. Throughout reciprocal reading lessons, children are taught specific reading skills such as inference, predicting and summarising to support comprehension. This is also supported through weekly Bedrock sessions where children are challenged and extended on their understanding of vocabulary and comprehension.

Our Academy English curriculum has been designed in a way to expose our children to a wide range of authors, themes and high-quality texts. Writing is linked to these books to ensure that our children produce a vast range of writing genres. As well as daily focused reading time, teachers read to their classes daily to model reading aloud. Handwriting is taught with support from the PenPals scheme with practice throughout the week.

Grammar and punctuation knowledge and skills are taught contextually through lessons as much as possible. Teachers plan to teach the required skills through the genres of writing that they are teaching, linking it to the genre to make it more connected with the intended writing outcome.

Lesson Structure

We teach English as a whole class in Key stage 1 and 2 so that all children have access to age-related skills and knowledge contained in the national curriculum. Within lessons, teachers target support for all children to enable them to achieve at an age-related level wherever possible. This may involve a greater level of scaffolding and access to additional support materials such as Word Banks or a greater level of modelling. Those children who show a deeper understanding are also given opportunities to extend their writing in a variety of ways: through showing greater control in their writing; a deeper understanding of the impact that their writing has on the reader; and by using a higher level of vocabulary and grammar features.

Reception

Year 1

Year 2