‘We will show everyone love and respect, living and learning with courage and joy.’

English

English teaches pupils to speak and write fluently so that they can communicate their ideas and emotions to others. Through learning to read and listen, pupils can receive communication from others.

Reading

The pupils are taught how to decode text, how to read for meaning and how to evaluate the author’s choice of vocabulary, imagery and text structure. Reading is central to all teaching and learning across the curriculum and pupils need to leave Astley equipped with the required reading fluency and accuracy to access their high school education.

Most importantly we intend to develop every pupil’s love of words, language and literature of different genres, including fiction, non-fiction and poetry. Reading for pleasure is at the core of our reading ethos and each class enjoys class stories daily, selected from vocabulary-rich, high-quality texts.

The systematic teaching of phonics, using Read Write Inc. has a high priority throughout Reception and Key Stage 1. Phonics is taught daily to all children in Foundation Stage, Year 1 and those in Year 2 who have not passed phonics screening in Year 1. Pupils are taught the relationship between sounds and the written spelling patterns, or graphemes, which represent them.

Reading for meaning strategies (In the moment of reading) and reading comprehension skills (Vocabulary, Inference, Prediction, Explanation, Retrieval and Summary) are taught through a combination of focused group work and whole class teaching. Children are encouraged to read aloud and read independently every day in class and at home, choosing from a class library of up-to-date and appealing texts. Regular opportunities are provided in the school calendar for the children to experience ‘performance reading’ to an audience.

Writing

The pupils are taught how to express their understanding and response to the world accurately and effectively in writing. They are taught how to adapt their writing to different purposes and audiences. There is an emphasis on providing real purposes for writing, encouraging pride in the presentation of their work and opportunities to share and celebrate their mastery of language.

The school has adopted Jane Considine’s ‘The Write Stuff’ approach to the teaching and learning of writing skills through demonstration writing, developing pupil’s use of tier 2 vocabulary and teaching grammatical understanding in context. In addition to writing inspired by high quality texts, opportunities for writing are provided in all learning across the curriculum.

Spelling in Reception and into Key Stage 1 is taught hand in hand with the Read, Write Inc phonics scheme where links are made between phonemes (sounds) and their matching graphemes (letter combinations). From Year 2 – 6, spelling is taught daily through investigations, grapheme/ phoneme correspondence, syllables, morphology, etymology, common exception words and personalised spelling lists for each child.