A St Oswald's Writer and Reader
English is led by the CORE English team.
Our English Co-ordinators at St Oswalds is Fiona Fields and Alex Evans
Writing
In order to encourage creativity and independence in writing we write for an extended period regularly throughout the school following Pathways to Write. This allows teachers to assess progress and evaluate personal short term targets regularly.
RCSAT writing Philosophy is:
- If a child can say it, a child can write it!
- The Talking voice is not the same as the Writing voice.
Children are encouraged to:
- Talk about their writing.
- Find exciting words and use these in their writing.
- ‘Borrow’ exciting words and phrases from other authors. ‘WOW’ words.
- Have a go at using interesting examples of punctuation.
- Write for an extended period of time.
- Re-read their own writing and find ways to make it better.
- Understand what they need to do next to improve.
- Use spelling, grammar and punctuation appropriate to their age and genre
We encourage our children to apply their literacy skills in all areas of the curriculum and in homework activities.
As part of our writing cycle children are given opportunities to develop their knowledge and understanding of particular genres. Through the writing cycle children will experience frequent independent opportunities to write before completing a final piece which will be entered into their writing celebration books. The writing in these books will show the child’s ability to apply the content, skills, grammar, features and spelling of each genre taught.
We develop handwriting using a progressive pre-cursive font called 'Nelson FK' this supports pupils to join letters from an early age. Our handwriting books start from KS1 so that the children develop a pre-cursive style ready for formal joining. Handwriting is evaluated when children complete work for their writing celebration books.
Reading
We believe that reading should be a source of pleasure and that it is the key to learning. We aim to involve parents/carers in children’s reading as much as possible. Children read to a range of adults, either individually or in groups, on a daily basis.
Their Individual Reading Record books are an important source of communication between home and school, especially in the early years. We have started using Accelerated reader. This is a fantastic reading programme for children to acces after ReadWriteInc. The children undertake a reading test which gives them a reading score. This score then correlates to a coloured book. When a child has finished a book, they can then access a quiz on that book. This helps test their comprehension and understanding. This new scheme is proving a great success in KS2.
Phonics are taught using the ReadWrite Inc. programme. We use a combination of whole class teaching and group or individual work.For support in how to correctly pronounce the phonemes please follow the link.
The New National Curriculum is used as a guide, but work is also taught thematically to reinforce and link to other areas of the curriculum.
In Year 1 our children take the National Phonics screening Test. Here is a link to an app that will support them in this. https://www.pippoplearning.com/phonics-screening-test
