English: Writing and Reading
Proficiency in reading, writing and oracy is vital to the lifelong success of our pupils.
We want all pupils to develop the confidence and skill to express themselves verbally. Research has shown that high quality oracy education can positively impact academic outcomes, confidence, emotional wellbeing and equips children to thrive in life beyond school.
Pupils understanding of language should be developed and enhanced through speaking and listening skills. We create a language-rich environment throughout school, starting with the fundamentals of language acquisition and communication in the early years, and progressing to skilful communication and articulation by Year 6.
Writing
We strive for pupils to be confident and effective writers and our vision is for all pupils to express themselves creatively and imaginatively across all areas of the curriculum. Writing units are planned in accordance with the Braywick Court School text map, which outlines high quality texts which have been specifically chosen for each year group. The texts used are reviewed annually and are chosen to ensure a range of classic and modern literature, varied genres, a range of authors and exposure to culturally diverse literature. Writing units are planned and taught using a key text as a core thread. Throughout one unit of work pupils will produce varied writing outcomes covering a range of genres, audiences and purposes. Writing units also ensure that pupils have access and exposure to complementary texts that enhance, challenge or enrich the core text being studied. Pupils work towards published pieces of writing which can take various forms and are always shared with an audience.
Our approach to English in multi-faceted, ensuring that English knowledge and skills are taught and applied across the whole curriculum. High quality texts create a literature spine throughout the school, ensuring that our pupils have access to a diverse range of reading material and stimuli. The Braywick Court School curriculum aims to enable our pupils to become confident and independent learners with a passion to succeed and a curiosity for the world around them.
Braywick Court School English Policy
Reading
We strive for pupils to develop a lifelong love of reading, to be confident and fluent readers who enjoy reading for pleasure. The deeply rooted culture of reading within our school is intended to promote reading at every opportunity. Research shows that reading for pleasure has a positive impact on children’s attainment. Children who read for pleasure have enhanced levels of text comprehension, an increased knowledge of grammar and show improvement in their writing. Research has also found children who read often at the age of 10 perform better than their peers in tests of spelling, vocabulary and even mathematics when tested at the age of 16, they also have more positive attitudes towards reading than their peers.
We believe in both the importance of developing children’s discrete word-reading skills and comprehension, and the need to engender their love of books and reading. We recognise these two elements are intertwined; each relies on the other if children are to become life-long readers. We have two fully stocked libraries which pupils use weekly. The libraries offer a range of high quality texts, carefully selected by staff and pupils. We ensure that our library stock represents a range of authors and cultures and is regularly reviewed.
Pupil librarians play an important role in promoting the library. In addition, each class has a clearly visible reading area from which pupils are encouraged to select books to read for pleasure. Staff ensure that stock with in the class library complements, enhances and extends the curriculum being taught and covers a range of fiction and non-fiction. Ongoing fundraising and parental support ensures the library stock is able to be refreshed and remain current and meet the needs of all of our pupils.
Phonics and Early Reading
All staff are trained in the teaching of the Monster Phonics systematic synthetic phonics. This is an award-winning, multi-sensory phonics programme which uses colour to consistently code for key graphemes in English. It is unique in that it uses character (monsters!) phoneme cues and colour-coding to represent the long vowel sounds, silent letters and tricky letters. By using colour-coding to promote understanding, we obtain improved results.
Monster Phonics creates a love of learning by making learning fun and more memorable through categorising the 44 sounds into 10 categories and each of these 10 categories are represented by a monster. Each monster is a different colour, and this colour represents that way of spelling the sound. This makes learning to read and spell much easier and more fun. The child learns through the assignment of colour and the linkage of the sound, as well as seeing the colour, creating more ways of remembering the spelling. The games, songs and activities within the programme continuously reflect this way of learning, so that structure is constantly seen, heard and experienced by your child. This consistency is critical in ensuring that a complicated language is learnt in the most simplistic way.
Phonics is taught daily from preschool to Year 2, and covers a range of skills including phoneme grapheme correspondence, decoding, segmenting and blending and reading for meaning. Pupils are given the opportunity to apply their phonic knowledge through carefully planned activities. Whole class phonics teaching ensures a balance between teacher directed instruction and pupil participation.
By Year 2, Monster Phonics also focuses upon the spelling and grammar rules found within the national curriculum and provides a seamless transition for pupils to be ready for Key Stage 2.
Decodable Reading Books
We have Monster Phonics books available in school and they are used during guided reading sessions and as take home books. Pupils will receive at least one Monster Phonics book per week. The Monster Phonics books are fully decodable. This means that children can read them using just their phonics skills and knowledge.
The sounds in the book that children take home reflect the sequence of sounds taught in school meaning that your child should be able to read this text at around 90% accuracy and fluency. It is important that pupils are given the opportunity to re-read books many times to build up their fluency and confidence in word reading. Pupils also have access to the eBook library of previously read Monster Phonics books.
Assessment of Phonics and Early Reading
Regular and efficient monitoring of children’s development in phonics is essential if they are to become competent and confident readers, and subsequently writers. The Monster Phonics programme has a clearly mapped set of assessments which allows for checking children’s grapheme-phoneme correspondence (GPC), knowledge of High-Frequency Words (HFWs) and Common Exception Words (CEWs) for reading and writing.
The assessment schedule for Monster Phonics is broken down for each year group; Reception, Year One and Year Two. Each year group has a set of graphemes, CEWs and HFWs to be learnt and then assessed.
Pupils in Year 1 are well prepared for the Phonics Screening Check which takes place in the Summer Term.
Find out more about Monster Phonics
An Introduction to Monster Phonics
Supporting Your Child with Monster Phonics
Monster Phonics Tips for Parents
Year 3 to Year 6 - Reading
All children who attend Braywick Court School to leave us fully literate and with a life long love of books and reading.
Once our pupils have moved beyond phonics and early reading, they are explicitly taught through daily whole class reading lessons. Pupils from Year 2 to Year 6 have a dedicated 30min reading lesson every day. Core texts have been chosen to complement the topics pupils are studying within foundation subjects and also link to pupils writing in English lessons.
To further develop a love of reading, all teachers promote reading for pleasure by reading to their class every day for at least 10 minutes.
Pupils in Key Stage 2 (from Year 3-6) follow the Oxford Reading Tree reading levels and have access to a wide range of genres of reading material, as well as the class and school libraries.
Pupils take SATs or NTS assessments termly in Years 2 to 6 to assess the impact of reading skills lessons and language comprehension. These assessments feed into the curriculum reviews and leaders and teachers make any changes necessary to support pupils.