A child’s ability to communicate is vital to all aspects of their learning therefore English is at the core of our curriculum. Speaking and Listening, Reading and Writing skills are taught from Nursery through to Year 6.
The aim is for all St. George children to be confident and enthusiastic speakers, readers and writers, and so we provide a broad range of daily activities for children to practice these skills.
At St. George we teach Literacy through The Power of Reading. We aim for our children to leave school as successful fluent readers.
The Power of Reading is about teaching Literacy through high quality books and creative teaching approaches. This approach aims to engage and motivate children in their literacy learning.
It also enables children to deepen their understanding of texts and provides a meaningful context for writing.
A quality text is used as the basis for learning over several weeks. Children explore and discuss the text through creative activities. They also write in a range of genres as part of the unit. For example they might write a letter in role as a character or write a newspaper recount about the events in the text.
Reading aloud is a key part of the Power of Reading. This strategy enables all children to access quality texts. It also enables the teacher to model expressive and fluent reading to the children. Children then echo what they have heard read aloud in their own writing.
Literacy is also closely linked with other areas of the curriculum. In order to support writing across the curriculum, children visit museums and other places of interest for history and geography, they work with authors and participate in writing and drama activities. All of these experiences are used to help inspire and extend writing. Writing activities have meaning and purpose with links to real life contexts and experiences. Marking and feedback ensures that children know their next step target and can make progress.
These are some of the quality texts we use:
See the full book lists here
Please click on this link to find out more about the Power of Reading and how it can benefit your child. Ask them what they enjoy about the texts they are reading in class. http://por.clpe.org.uk/
At St George’s we prepare children for learning to read by developing their phonic knowledge and skills. Phonics is taught using letter sounds.
We follow a systematic programme which relates exactly to the “Letters and Sounds” phonic phases. There are six overlapping phases. The table below is a summary based on the Letters and Sounds guidance.
Phonic Knowledge and Skills
|Phase One (Nursery/Reception)||Activities are divided into seven aspects, including environmental sounds, instrumental sounds, body sounds, rhythm and rhyme, alliteration, voice sounds and finally oral blending and segmenting.|
|PhaseTwo (Reception) up to 6 weeks||Learning 19 letters of the alphabet and one sound for each. Blending sounds together to make words. Segmenting words into their separate sounds. Beginning to read simple captions.|
|Phase Three (Reception) up to 12 weeks||The remaining 7 letters of the alphabet, one sound for each. Graphemes such as ch, oo, th representing the remaining phonemes not covered by single letters. Reading captions, sentences and questions. On completion of this phase, children will have learnt the “simple code”, i.e. one grapheme for each phoneme in the English language.|
|Phase Four (Reception) 4 to 6 weeks||No new grapheme-phoneme correspondences are taught in this phase. Children learn to blend and segment longer words with adjacent consonants, e.g. swim, clap, jump.|
|Phase Five (Throughout Year 1)||Now we move on to the “complex code”. Children learn more graphemes for the phonemes which they already know, plus different ways of pronouncing the graphemes they already know.|
|Phase Six (Throughout Year 2 and beyond)||Working on spelling, including prefixes and suffixes, doubling and dropping letters etc.|
Assessment takes place half-termly. We use assessment information to make provision for the following half-term, making sure that children are placed in Phonics phases that best reflect their current ability and progress in phonics.
The number of children learning at each phase will change during the academic year, and we will assign teachers accordingly.
Useful websites related to Phonics
Other useful websites
Each week we have paired reading sessions. Classes are buddied up and children share books and stories they’ve written.