English

Reading at Wymondley...

Early Reading and Phonics

We are passionate about reading and children’s literature at Wymondley School. All classes share a text every day and reading is a key part of each school day. As parents, it is vital that you establish a reading culture at home too and make time for that all all-important bedtime story. All the years of research tell us that children who do best in education have had a good foundation in talk and literature at home before the age of five.

Children get better at reading… by reading, by being read to and by discussing the things that they are reading in a relaxed and enjoyable conversation. There are many ways that we as a school help to encourage your child to want to read and to find enjoyment from reading, which are detailed below.

Please ask your child's class teacher if there’s anything that you would like to discuss about reading.

Shared Reading... Parents (or family members or a family friend if notified in advance as we fully appreciate that parents also have other commitments) of our Reception and Year 1 and 2 children (Puffins and Toucans) are invited to come and join us every Tuesday between 8:45-9:05am and every Thursday between 8.45-9.05am in Toucans and 2:55-3:10pm in Puffins to share a story with your child. The boost that a child can get from enjoying time reading with friends cannot be underestimated, not to mention the quality time that they get to spend with a family member focused only on them and their book!

Themed Days... We hold regular themed days throughout the school year, during which children's learning is focused on a particular theme for the day and parents from all classes are invited to come and join us for the first hour of the day to take part in the learning activities with their child, which always proves to be a great morning! World Book Day is always celebrated and days such as 'Roald Dahl Day', 'Take One Book' weeks and 'Author of the Term' have featured in recent years as well.

Library Lessons... We take great pride in our school library and even greater pride in seeing it being well-used by the children. We operate library lessons for our Reception and Year 1 and 2 children as part of the curriculum, where they learn how to use the library and, most importantly of all, how to enjoy the great range of books that our library has!

Library Club... We make sure that children in Years 3,4,5 and 6 don't miss out by giving them the option of attending library club each week during their lunch hour. The club is well attended and enjoyed so much by some that they go on to take on the role of school librarian and keep the library in top condition ready to be enjoyed by everyone.

Reading for pleasure...Children progress through the Little Wandle until they become 'free readers'. Each class have a wide selection of books (some of which are from the old reading scheme) which enables our children to have access to a rich and varied range of texts and authors during their time at our school. Our class reading books and our school library books are all updated regularly to make sure that they are appealing and enjoyable for all with a range of challenge to make sure that there is a book for everyone!

Parent Volunteers... We are always grateful to our parent volunteers who give up their time to come in and give children even more of that one-to-one reading experience, as every one of our children can never have too much time reading, talking and laughing about a book with an adult!

Reading in and Around the Curriculum... As you can gather, reading is really important to us at Wymondley School and, as well as all of the above, it features strongly throughout the curriculum as well, be that through a guided reading session or through investigating an authentic newspaper from WW2 as part of a History topic. Classes enjoy reading a class book during the school day - reading is everywhere!

Little Wandle Phonics

Through phonics at Wymondley School, children are taught to read and write daily. Throughout the EYFS and KS1, teachers follow the ‘Little Wandle for Letters and Sounds revised', a complete, systematic, synthetic phonics programme. The programme is effective and ensures learning stays in children’s long-term memory and enables children to apply their learning to become highly competent readers. There is a high expectation of the progress of all learners.

Each day the whole class phonics lesson structure is the same and provides direct teaching in short bursts. It allows a consistent approach which maintains a secure, systematic progression for phonics learning. The pace of learning and repeated practice means that children become secure readers. The application of phonics is made through fully decodable books, aligned with learned phonemes. Effective keep-up support is put in place for children who are at risk of falling behind. These pupils are identified in the moment during whole class teaching and keep-up support is targeted quickly and effectively and half-termly assessments are made to check that all children are 'on track'.

The Structure of a Daily Whole Class Phonics Lesson

Revisit and Review

Teach and practise

Apply

Each session begins with a revisit and review of previously taught GPCs. This is done using the same mantras each lesson to ensure a consistent approach and to avoid cognitive overload. The repetitive nature of revisiting and reviewing recently taught GPCs allows these to move into the pupils' long-term memory.

New GPCs are introduced in the same way each day using the Little Wandle resources to allow children the consistency they need to take on the new information quickly. Mnemonics and catchphrases for digraphs are effectively used to help children to remember the phonemes. Formation phrases are used to help children to form each grapheme. There is a focus on oral blending which leads into teacher lead blending of words. This then leads to independent reading of words. New tricky words are taught and previously taught tricky words are reviewed.

During the application stage, pupils are taught to read simple sentences, being encouraged to locate recent new learning in the sentence. Pupils are also given the opportunity to practise spellings and sentence writing. Current phonics learning is further applied and practised during the 3 weekly reading practice sessions.

Supporting Phonics in the Environment

It is important that the children are able to use their phonics knowledge independently and apply it to their own writing in a natural way once they have been taught the phonemes that they need. Our classroom environment is planned to enable this kind of independent phonics application.

Phoneme mats are available at all times, which encourages children to use their phonics knowledge in their independent writing. This is especially true in child-initiated learning (CIL), where the child has decided to write for their own purpose.

All taught phonemes are displayed as they are taught. This means that children know where to look to remind themselves when writing. An alphabet is displayed that children can add to with words and pictures relating to each letter. This is particularly useful at the start of the year as letters, such as the one at the beginning of their name, are significant to them.

Early Reading

At Wymondley School, we have a passion for teaching the skill of reading and building a life-long love of reading. This starts in the early years when early reading is taught in a variety of ways during phonics lessons and reading practice. It is focussed on decoding the text, prosody or use of performance voice and comprehension. Books are matched to the child’s current phonic level in order to give each child the confidence to apply their phonics knowledge to word, caption and sentence reading. These books are then sent home where children are able to confidently read to their families with fluency and accuracy. The classroom environment is set up to ensure that a love of reading is encouraged in different areas. The early years practitioners take opportunities throughout the day to promote reading, having story times, reading poetry and encouraging children to refer to non-fiction texts during their child-initiated play. Core texts are chosen to support the teaching of all areas of the curriculum. These are displayed as a class reading journey and allow the children to see what they have learned so far. The children often talk about the core texts previously used and have access to these in the provision.

Reading Practice in Early Years and Key Stage 1

Each child takes part in three reading practice lessons a week. Each lesson has a different focus and allows children to become fluent when reading the text. The first lesson focusses on decoding the text, with the children concentrating on applying their phonic knowledge and developing fluency when reading the words. The second reading session provides the opportunity to read the book again and practise reading with prosody, so the children develop reading with appropriate meaning, stress and intonation. It provides an opportunity to explore characters’ feelings, what words mean and how punctuation adds to the meaning. At Wymondley, we call this our performance voice. By the third session, the children should be automatically applying their decoding skills to read with greater accuracy and fluency, enabling their working memory to be freed up to focus on comprehension. The purpose of the reading practice session for comprehension is to develop children’s comprehension skills by using the reading content domains (2015 Key Stage 1: English reading test framework).

• Draw on their knowledge of vocabulary to understand texts.

• Identify/explain key aspects of fiction and non-fiction texts.

• Identify and explain the sequence of events in the text.

• Inference and deduction.

• Prediction

Writing at Wymondley

At Wymondley, we believe that every child is a writer. We are passionate about developing every child’s knowledge, motivation and confidence in their writing. We have chosen HFL Education’s ESSENTIALWRITING as the basis of our writing curriculum for years 1-6. This is an ambitious and progressive writing scheme which provides our children with opportunities and tools to write for a range of specific purposes and authentic audiences. As a result, our children feel inspired and ready to write high-quality outcomes within the classroom but also have the knowledge, strategies and confidence to choose to write in their own lives. We follow a two-year rolling programme to ensure children access complete coverage of the curriculum without unnecessary repetition. Medium term plans include adaptations to support with delivering a well-pitched curriculum within a mixed age class.

Writing Purpose	Years 1 & 2	Years 3 & 4	Years 5 & 6
To entertain	✓	✓	✓
To inform	✓	✓	✓
To persuade		✓	✓
To discuss			✓

Each year group has 13-16 teaching units, all of which use diverse and high-quality literature as good examples of writing craft and to help to motivate or inspire children to write.

ESSENTIALWRITING is fully aligned with the National Curriculum for English including writing composition, vocabulary, grammar & punctuation for each year group. Each writing unit is progressively structured and centred around the different writing purposes: to entertain; to inform; to persuade; to discuss. The writing purposes are also progressively sequenced across the school (see table, left).

A full overview of the genres covered in each class and Key Stage can be found in the ESSENTIALWRITING Overview at the bottom of this page.

Follow this link to access the statutory content of the English objectives within the National Curriculum: English programmes of study: key stages 1 and 2 (publishing.service.gov.uk). The information below outlines our approach to the teaching of writing in each year group, which encompasses the teaching of the statutory content as outlined within the National Curriculum for writing for key stage one (Year 1 – Year 2), lower key stage two (Year 3 – 4) and upper key stage two (Year 5 – Year 6). For this academic year, ESSENTIALWRITING is implemented in Y1 – Y6 but builds on the foundational learning from the EYFS.

Alongside ESSENTIALWRITING, at Wymondley, we have adopted Little Wandle at Key Stage 1 and Spelling Shed at Key Stage 2 ass the basis of our spelling curriculum. ESSENTIALWRITING supports our children to apply this learning in context and build their spelling confidence. Writing models reflect age-appropriate spelling objectives and children are taught how to monitor the accuracy of their writing. Handwriting is also taught. We have adopted PenPals Handwriting to ensure that every child gains sufficient fluency for writing, with knowledge of accurate letter formation and how to join letters so that they can meet the National Curriculum expectations for each key stage.

YEAR 1/2

In key stage one (Years 1/2), the children are always encouraged to write for an authentic audience and are introduced to the concept of writing to entertain and to inform their readers. Alongside their growing knowledge of how sounds are represented in writing (grapheme-phoneme correspondence, or GPCs), the children learn how to use this knowledge to write a wider range of vocabulary to support their own compositions. For children in Year 1, simple sentence structure is emphasised, along with use of spaces between words, capital letters and full stops, to help the reader know where one idea ends and another begins. For children in Year 2, they are taught how to join their ideas to create greater variety and interest for the reader. The children will also start to extend the range of punctuation applied by using question marks and exclamation marks in their writing. Children in Year 2 are introduced to using a comma to separate items in a list and apostrophes to show where letters are missing (contraction) or singular possession. A range of wider vocabulary is taught and encouraged within the children’s writing, to support more detailed description, along with the use of adjectives and adverbs to add detail to nouns and verbs. They will become familiar with a range of genres, such as narratives, recipes, letters and explanations, and enjoy playing with language whilst writing their own poetry.

YEAR 3/4

In lower key stage two (Years 3/4), the children consolidate their understanding of writing to entertain and to inform. For children in Year 3, they will be introduced to writing to persuade for the first time. In doing so, they will develop a keener awareness of the reader, by considering how to move and convince their audience to act and/or change their mind. They will encounter new genres, such as personal narratives (memoirs), fables, persuasive speeches and other sub-genres of poetry (such as calligrams and kennings), and revise their genre knowledge of instructions, letters and non-chronological reports. They will revisit learning from key stage one to ensure that they are familiar with simple sentence structure and build upon this by using a greater range of conjunctions to join their ideas in writing. Accurate punctuation of dialogue is introduced in Year 3/4, along with the use of prepositions and adverbs to tell the reader when, where and how things happened. The children will also learn how to structure their writing, by including paragraphs and/or headings and subheadings to support the reader to navigate the writing more effectively. Children in Year 4 are also taught about a greater variety of ways to begin sentences, such as with a fronted adverbial to link back to a previous sentence or paragraph and/or to move the writing on for the reader. A greater range and/or usage of punctuation is taught to children in Year 4, such as the use of a comma to separate groups of words or phrases within a sentence and the use of an apostrophe to signify plural possession.

YEAR 5/6

In upper key stage two (Year 5/6), the children are introduced to writing to discuss for the first time. They will also spend time writing to entertain, inform and persuade, and enjoy building upon their knowledge of these writing purposes, selecting from a wider range of sophisticated language choices based on their intended effect on the reader. Children in Year 5/6 will be encouraged to continually review and refine their writing, based on their understanding of how to use and manipulate grammar and vocabulary to achieve their desired effect. A wider range of punctuation is introduced in order to achieve this, including the use of brackets, dashes and commas for parenthesis, as well as colons to introduce a list or set up a dramatic surprise or pause for the reader. They are encouraged to focus on cohesion (making sure that the ideas within the writing link and flow) within and across paragraphs. Children in Year 6 will be encouraged to experiment more widely with their sentence structure, according to the needs of their reader, and be introduced to more sophisticated grammatical choices, such as the passive voice and subjunctive form. The range of formality required for the audience will also become a significant element of the children’s decision-making process. Along with the range of punctuation already taught across the primary phase, children in Year 6 will practise how to use semi-colons, colons and dashes to mark the boundaries between independent clauses. In order to ensure that the children can be independent writers and showcase their talents for writing, they are provided with time and choice to support their selection of subject matter within their compositions and apply their learning within extended written outcomes.

Enrichment Opportunities

Links Across the Curriculum

Take one book week each term

Author/poet focus each term

Themed weeks

Parent volunteers

Shared readers

Reading Dog

Masked Reader

World Book Day

Writing for publication/sharing

Writing for different audiences (within school)

Reading challenges such as 'Summer Reading Challenge' set by the Hertfordshire Library Service

Visiting Authors

PSHE- mental well being texts

(feel good reads recommended by staff)

PSHE-linked to themes and current issues (class reads and library)

Topic- Range of rich texts used to support topic teaching in

for geography. history, art and science

Written tasks often linked to topic areas

English- library time for all children

Rights Respecting Schools-texts to support rights and values,

Rights Respecting Schools-children to present in assemblies to their peers

Religious Education- Books that support cultural awareness and celebrate diversity

English in EYFS...

Following the new EYFS framework, the children in Puffins class begin to develop early reading skills. They are taught phonics every day using our Little Wandle Letters and Sounds revised programme. Language skills are a key focus in Puffins class and the children are given plenty of opportunities to talk and articulate what they would like to learn. The children are given the opportunity to share work and experiences recorded from home on Tapestry with their classmates. The children also have opportunities for speaking and listening through their 'Magic Moments' task, where children are encouraged to recount an experience they have had-a visit, a holiday, a special occasion, or even a walk or visit to the local park.

Speaking and Listening...

Throughout their time at Wymondley, children are given lots of opportunities to talk, ask and answer questions and present to an audience. This includes sharing their work in assemblies, presentations as part of a project task, discussion and debate sessions in class and in assemblies, role play and regular productions where the children perform to a live audience in Christmas performances and the Key Stage 2 summer shows.