English
Subject Leaders: Miss Wilson
Supported by the Talk for Writing Project Team (Mr Kelly, Mr Crompton, Mrs Pennill) and the Phonics Lead, Mrs Pennill
At Etchells Primary School we aim to develop pupils’ English abilities within an integrated programme of Speaking and Listening, Reading, Writing, Spelling, Grammar and Punctuation. Pupils are given a broad and balanced approach to the teaching of English, with opportunities to consolidate and reinforce skills taught across the curriculum.
Reading:
Our whole school approach is to have a ‘Reading rich’ curriculum, this includes:
supporting children to develop a love of books and reading
supporting children to engage in speaking, listening and responding
enabling children to share in the reading process with an experienced reader
supporting children to develop a love of books and reading
promoting independent reading
Some pupils receive targeted interventions and attend pre reading sessions, where extra support is needed in decoding and comprehension as our ultimate goal is that all pupils:
learn to read easily and fluently through daily phonics in Key Stage 1 and continuing in KS2 for those needing it. See the slides below from our Spring 26 RWI Phonics explainer parents meeting.
read widely through our use of differing class texts and high-quality books in classrooms
read for pleasure using reading partners, quiet reading time, and listening to an adult read.
read to find information across the curriculum
How reading is taught at Etchells Primary School:
Firstly, children are immersed in stories to address motivation to read. In Nursery they learn that sounds can be represented by letters and they learn to Fred-talk (to say the sounds that build into words in the way that Fred the frog does). From Reception, they start daily phonics lessons where they learn the 75 most common sound-letter combinations as well as 'red words', those which are tricky to decode.
Alongside phonics, immersion in stories, poetry, rhyme, song and information texts ensures that children are motivated to read. As soon as they are really getting to grips with phonics we work on their fluency, developing their speed and accuracy.
Once children are confident and increasingly fluent, the focus moves to comprehension, whilst continuing to ensure that reading for pleasure is prioritised. Where children need additional support, they will receive 1:1 support in either phonics, fluency or comprehension.
Comprehension:
Alongside the teaching of decoding, whole class reading is taught using the content domain. The content domains set out the relevant elements from the National Curriculum programme of study for English at key stage 2 that are assessed in the English reading test. The content domain focuses on the comprehension elements of the National Curriculum.
In KS2, the children have 5 discrete comprehension lessons a week focussing on learning the skills needed to understand a text (KS1 5 over a two-week period). As a school, we use the Scofield and Sims Comprehension Complete Series. This is an essential companion for teaching reading comprehension which is written by a team of expert authors, it provides everything needed to develop the individual comprehension skills identified in the National Curriculum, alongside the broader vocabulary and background knowledge required for effective reading comprehension.
Writing:
At Etchells we teach the children to be confident and competent in transcription (handwriting, spelling, punctuation and grammar) and in composition (planning and writing engaging stories, poems and informative texts which they proof-read and edit to improve). The process we use for this is called Talk for Writing, developed by Pie Corbett. This involves the children learning a model story or text off by heart and then progressing through three stages from admiring a given story, to stealing some ideas to using these ideas to produce their own independent work, inspired by the models: Imitation, Innovation, Independent Application. In Early Years the final stage is Invention: from given stimuli the children create and tell their own stories.
There are a range of commonly used and understood actions and symbols we use to help with learning stories. The videos at the bottom of this page show the most common ones.
Please use the QR code or link below to view our Reading and Writing Padlets.
https://padlet.com/clairewilson24/eps-writing-upkvgt2qgyxu8yyt
https://padlet.com/headteacher343/eps-reading-xfns5k71597a5mcn
