At Folksworth Church of England Primary School, our English curriculum is designed to develop the children’s love of reading and writing and to prepare them as they continue on their educational journey and into their adult life, as confident and successful citizens. Our progressive curriculum is built around rich and varied high quality texts and authors, to inspire a reading for pleasure as well as enhance their oracy and written language, with opportunities to build on their reading and writing experiences which are strengthened with the links to the themes.
We encourage children to take pride in their writing, to be able to effectively communicate their ideas and emotions through wide vocabulary choices. This is further enhanced through developing oracy skills, in discussions and debates for example, to promote value in the English language and confidence to connect to their audience across a range of contexts fluently.
At the heart of Folksworth Church of England Primary School, we value reading and writing as key life skills and aim to enable every learner to be lifelong readers.
Phonics
Phonics is taught using the ‘Read, Write, Inc.’ programme as a basis for our teaching. Streamed groups are taught through timetabled sessions five days a week in Reception, Year 1 and Year 2.
Read, Write,Inc. is an inclusive synthetic phonics reading and writing programme for all children learning to read and write. Specially written books support the progression of pupils' phonological knowledge. It also promotes comprehension, writing and spelling skills.
Reading
Our approach to reading at key stages 1 and 2 consist of 2 dimensions:
• word reading • comprehension (both listening and reading)
Our teaching focuses on developing pupils’ competence in both dimensions; different kinds of teaching are provided for each.
Our curriculum ensures that skilled word reading involves both the speedy working out of the pronunciation of unfamiliar printed words (decoding) and the speedy recognition of familiar printed words. We ensure that underpinning both is an understanding that the letters on the page represent the sounds in spoken words. This is why we emphasise phonics in the early teaching of reading to beginners (i.e. unskilled readers) when they start our school.
Our curriculum ensures that good comprehension draws from linguistic knowledge (in particular of vocabulary and grammar) and on knowledge of the world. Comprehension skills are developed through pupils’ experience of high-quality discussion with teachers, as well as from reading and discussing a range of stories, poems and non-fiction.
Through our curriculum design all pupils are encouraged to read widely across both fiction and non-fiction to develop an appreciation and love of reading, and to gain knowledge across the curriculum. We encourage pupils to read widely and often to increase pupils’ vocabulary because they encounter words they would rarely hear or use in everyday speech.
It is our aim therefore that, by the end of their primary education, all pupils are able to read fluently, and with confidence, in any subject in their forthcoming secondary education.
In Foundation and Key Stage 1 we use 'Read, Write, Inc.' books in school and at home. These are supplemented by banded home reading books. Once children are ready we move onto using Accelerated Reader.
