A St Oswald's Writer and Reader
English is led by the CORE English team.
Nicola Badger, Caroline Dutton and Sarah Killick.
Our English Co-ordinator at St Oswalds is Caroline Dutton
Writing
In order to encourage creativity and independence in writing we write for an extended period regularly throughout the school following a writing cycle approach. 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 use a structured reading scheme alongside a wide range of fiction and non-fiction books.
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
Our reading scheme is based on the Book Bands for Guided Reading scheme produced by The Institute of Education, University of London.
