Literacy

English

At Loseley Fields Primary School, we believe that literacy and communication are key life skills. Through the English curriculum, we will help children develop the skills and knowledge that will enable them to communicate effectively and creatively through spoken and written language and equip them with the skills to become lifelong learners. We want children to enjoy and appreciate literature and its rich variety.

Literacy is at the heart of all children’s learning. It enables children to communicate with others effectively for a variety of purposes and to examine their own and others’ experiences, feelings and ideas, giving these order and meaning. Because literacy is central to children’s intellectual, emotional and social development it has an essential role across the curriculum and helps pupils learning to be coherent and progressive.

Teaching and Learning

At Loseley Fields Primary School we teach literacy through rich texts that stimulate purposeful and meaningful learning. The Power of Reading approach provides a rich bank of activities to support the children's understanding of the text and a wide variety of writing opportunities and is used to support the teachers planning. In each year group we aim to a wide variety of texts including heritage texts, poetry, multicultural stories and non- fiction (see attachment below for list of reading text).

Reading

We believe that all children should have the opportunity to become lifelong confident readers. We place great emphasis on immersing pupils in high quality literature that is at an appropriate level. Time is given to reading stories to the children in a variety of contexts such as to support a topic, within reading and writing as well as class books that are explored throughout a term. This enables children to:

- to understand the nature and function of print;
- to experience success and enjoyment in reading;
- to expose pupils to a range of literature (from both present and past times) and cultures;
- to expose children to a range of vocabulary;
- to develop enthusiastic, independent and reflective readers;
- to increase their ability to read with fluency, accuracy and understanding and
- to equip pupils with research and retrieval skills.

Toby B Reading Video - Click Here

Phonics

The teaching of reading in KS1 is mainly through daily phonics sessions. At Loseley Fields we have created a systematic synthetic programme to ensure children become confident and fluent readers. Phonics is taught every day in Reception and Year 1 and continued into Year 2 (if needed). Teachers ensure fidelity across the school by following the same phoneme-grapheme correspondence and creating engaging and challenging sessions for all pupil to participate in.

To find out more information on our Phonics programme please click HERE

At Key Stage 2 the emphasis is on higher order reading skills including the use of inference, personal response to the text and comprehension.

Guided Reading - At Loseley Fields we are committed to guided reading so that teachers can confidently teach the individual reading skills including the higher order skills. Additional time is allocated to guided reading in class timetables aside from daily Literacy lessons. Guided reading follows a whole class teaching model for most of the week (KS1 sometimes use more of a carousel model). Children are explicitly taught specific reading skills daily and work with the teacher at different points during the week. Teaching assistants are deployed accordingly to best support the learning. Letters and Sounds and the National Curriculum is used to inform objectives for guided reading sessions and teachers keep a record of the coverage of reading skills that are explicitly taught. Texts for group sessions are selected at an instructional level and cover a range of reading genres.

During this time children will be:

- using a range of strategies when reading;
- developing and consolidating their decoding skills;
- developing their skills of reading aloud, using intonation, pace and accent;
- developing their ability to talk about the text;
- developing their ability to respond to the text using response tasks.

Writing

Key objectives:

- to understand the value of writing as a means of communicating;
- to write with enjoyment, perseverance and a sense of purpose;
- to become independent writers;to organise and present their writing in a variety of ways;
- to write for a variety of purposes and audiences;
- to plan and redraft their writing;to collaborate and read their work aloud;
- to write with confidence, fluency and accuracy;to recognise the importance of grammar and   punctuationandto structure their writing.

A successful piece of writing is the product of both compositional and transcriptional skills. Finding a balance between the teaching of these skills is essential.

At Loseley Fields we acknowledge the difference between spoken and written language and where possible the writing is based on immersive activities such as reading, art or drama/talk for writing first. Discussion is encouraged both with the teacher, through open questions, and between pupils. A cross-curricular approach is often used so that work is within context and of interest to the children.

Great importance is placed on allowing the children to experience high quality texts. These high-quality texts link both reading and writing and are chosen from the Power of Reading scheme by CLPE. This provides suggestions for immersive experiences to help the children enter 'the world of the book' and to engage fully both with the text and the characters. They arrive at the point of writing with a clear idea of what they want to communicate and who they are writing for. These first-hand experiences also allow all children regardless of their ability to engage with the story.

Time is given to the development of work through planning, editing and publishing. This is based on the National Curriculum but also using ‘The Writing Process’ model.

Feedback is given to the children both at the point of writing and through the marking. This allows the children to edit their work in the light of this and informs the next steps in the planning and teaching.

Teachers attend termly meetings with other local schools to jointly assess and agree the writing standards in their year group.