English
READING
Intent: Enabling our children to access the world around them and develop a love of reading.
At Bignold we prioritise reading as a fundamental skill that our children require in order to access the broader curriculum and the world around them. There is explicit teaching of core reading strategies and cohesive learning approaches building conceptual fluency and preparing children for future demands of reading at secondary school.
Children begin their reading journey through our systematic synthetic phonics programme, Read Write Inc. and develop their comprehension skills through our ambitious reading curriculum. Underpinned by CUSP Reading, our curriculum progressively develops children's skills in retrieval, inference and explanation as well as vocabulary and language development. It exposes children to high quality ambitious texts which challenge their thinking and develop their range of experience. These texts have been mapped carefully to ensure a breadth of experiences, authors, texts and themes across the primary years, including core poems that each year group will study in detail such as The Raven by Edgar Allen Poe. These texts represent a promise from the school to every pupil that it serves, of the literature that it is committed to studying throughout a pupils' school journey.
Children’s reading fluency is closely monitored by the class teacher and once children have completed the school’s phonics programme they will continue to bring home a reading book appropriate to their reading level.
Opportunities to develop children’s love of reading come through the use of our wonderful school library, visits to other local libraries, author visits, themed book events and the use of exciting texts across our wider curriculum.
WRITING
Intent: Enabling our children to communicate information, thoughts, feelings and ideas legibly and fluently.
Our Writing curriculum focuses not only on the doing of writing but most importantly the teaching of writing.
We have reduced the number of text types visited in order to give time to revisit and deepen understanding of the text types we have chosen to teach. Each text type is visited at least twice during each academic year. Where appropriate text types are linked to learning in other subjects. The text types taught include a range of narrative text types, non-narrative text types and poetry.
Underpinned by CUSP Writing, conscious decisions have been made about the front loading of specific text types e.g. poetry in Year 1 in order to support vocabulary acquisition. Children are taught key skills which are revisited and taught through a vertical progression model, for example links between setting description in Year 1 and character description in Year 2 as well as links between biographical writing skills taught in Year 5 being revisited and used in autobiography writing in Year 6.
Our writing blocks follow a clear teaching process. Week one focuses on explicit skills, looking at the nuts and bolts of the writing process. During this time, children practise using these skills in short pieces of writing enabling us to minimise the cognitive load. Weeks two and sometimes three give children the opportunity to apply the skills from week one to a longer piece of writing. This part of the sequence follows a clear process which is expanded or retracted depending on the text type and age of the children. The process includes key areas such as identifying context, purpose and audience, immersing pupils in high quality models, oral rehearsal, writing and editing.
SPELLING
We teach spelling through CUSP as it is comprehensive and fully resourced; systematic and agile; balanced and progressive. The underpinning principles of spelling is that it is pattern seeking with systematic revisiting. Additional time is given to compex concepts and common errors. Spelling and word meaning are intrinsically linked so as well as teaching explicit spelling lessons, we revisit spelling through reading and writing in all subjects.