Literacy 

Our Vision for Literacy

Our vision for every child, is to ensure that each and every pupil reaches their full potential. We want to ensure that every child has a positive view of literature and builds solid foundation in reading and writing to be able to access the wider curriculum. To achieve this, we strive to ensure that pupils secure their key skills in Literacy through exciting and engaging learning opportunities.

Implementation

As a school, we celebrate and provide rich reading experiences at every available opportunity, so that all our children develop a love of the written word. Through the school’s promotion of reading, pupils are able to confidently explore and discuss texts in detail.

In the Early Years, pupils begin by exploring books with their peers and their teachers, using their understanding of phonics to begin the early stages of reading. Like all our classrooms, our Reception class is a language rich environment, and pupils are able to select from a range of exciting texts and engage in learning opportunities to further deepen their understanding. Parents are a hugely important part of a child’s reading journey and therefore the staff work in partnership with families from the outset to support their child’s learning at home.

The strong foundations established in the Early Years are built on, as the children move into Key Stage One. In these year groups, teachers deepen pupil’s learning and enjoyment of texts, by using a variety of questions to focus their understanding of the themes and characters presented. A range of rich texts are used, so that pupils use of vocabulary and enjoyment of reading is heightened. The breadth of our curriculum ensures that pupils have access to a wide range of poetry, fiction and non-fiction.

Reading Experiences at Long Buckby Infant School

At our school, we use a variety of strategies to support the teaching of reading, as all learners are individual and therefore can require different approaches to secure their skills. In recognition of this, teachers use a variety of decoding skills such as phonics and picture cues to ensure all pupils become competent and confident readers who enjoy the written word.

Independent Reading

Independent reading books support children at an individual level and are carefully chosen by teachers to aid and challenge our pupils. We use a variety of different materials and stimulus to enable our children to develop a love of reading. Our independent reading stage books are from the Oxford Reading Tree Reading Scheme, and provide pupils with opportunities to engage with both fiction, poetry and non-fiction materials.

Group Reading

Alongside independent reading the children read within groups.  Group reading is based on phonic understanding with books specifically aimed at their phonological progress, the children benefit from engaging in a structured book that reinforces their phonetical knowledge, this also allows them to model the skills needed to blend and segment a word.

Guided Reading

In addition to these reading opportunities, and from the end of the Early Years, all pupils have the opportunity to work in small groups with a member of staff to participate in Guided Reading. This provides pupils with further opportunities to explore challenging texts, discussing their themes to deepen their understanding of comprehension.

Phonics

Our Phonic teaching happens on a daily basis and is taught as a whole class. Our Phonics programme begins in the Early Years, as soon as the children are settled and ready. Phonics teaching then continues into Key Stage One, when the children have to complete the statutory assessment at the end of Year One.  Through continuous assessment additional small group words enables the children to have support and revise the sounds already taught.

At Long Buckby Infant School, we use the Little Wandle systematic synthetic phonics programme to ensure the progressive development of skills, so that pupils can decode effectively. In their Literacy learning; pupils are provided with the opportunity to develop and embed these key skills.

Writing

As a school we recognise that reading is fundamental to the writing process, as children can only write successfully if they have a full understanding of the features of specific genres. Therefore, there is a strong emphasis on using children’s knowledge of texts type and language to promote good writing skills. Through exciting contexts and stimulating experiences, children are actively encouraged to develop their own style of writing. Throughout the school, visual stimulus and drama are used to inspire children’s imaginations to write. In addition to support the writing process, teachers model examples of effective writing, so children can be successful in their own endeavours to become highly skilled writers. The effective use of good vocabulary and emotive language is highly encouraged and the children have opportunities to apply these skills throughout the curriculum.

Our pupils understanding of sentence structure and grammar is an important feature of the children’s learning in English. In recognition of this, it is taught discretely and embedded into every aspect of the children’s learning, so that they have every opportunity to refine and enhance their skill in this area.

At Long Buckby Infants School we use aspects of ‘Talk for Writing’ created by Pie Corbet and the ‘Training Space’ created by Jane Considine.

Handwriting

At our school, we strive to ensure that all our pupil’s books reflect the highest of outcomes and we recognise that neat presentation is an important skill. Therefore, we have a whole school approach to handwriting, the programme we use is Kinetic Letters. Support is provided for parents, so that they can actively encourage their child with this at home.

At Long Buckby Infant School, we support all our pupils to achieve:

• Correct formation, orientation and placement of letters.
• A comfortable and efficient pencil hold and working position.
• Develop fluent, legible and speedy handwriting that can be performed automatically.
• The ability to write clearly, accurately and coherently, adapting their language and style in and for a range of contexts, purposes and audiences.

Every class in EYFS and KS1 takes part in a Kinetic Letters lesson everyday which focuses on letter formation and then body strength and pencil grip are continuously reinforced throughout the school day in every lesson.

Here are the letter families the children will talk about and hopefully practise at home:

The programme then moves onto joining which is introduced in Year 2.

Spelling - Rainbow Words

The children are encouraged to read and spell the Common Exception Words.

The children learn spelling rules and patterns as well as strategies to correctly spell common exception words which follow the spelling requirements of the National Curriculum.

In Key Stage One the children are given a Rainbow Word Challenge booklet to encourage spelling the Common Exception Words at home. Once they have achieved a number of words, they receive a Bronze and Silver sticker.  On completion of all the words they are awarded with a Gold sticker.  A new set of words will then be allocated to the child.  This encourages them to have ownership over their spelling and learning of new words.

These are the Rainbow Words for Reception and Year 1 children: 

These are the Rainbow Words for Year 2 children: