At Templefield, English and the teaching of English is embedded across the curriculum. Our aim is to ensure that every child progresses in the areas of reading, writing, speaking and listening. We believe in supporting our children to love reading and writing.
We recognise the importance of nurturing a culture where children take pride in their writing, can write clearly and accurately and adapt their language and style for a range of contexts. We believe in setting high standards in the presentation of writing along with setting the important foundations in spelling and grammar. We aim to inspire children in their writing by providing opportunities to develop and apply their writing skills across the curriculum.
We value reading as a key life skill and we are dedicated to enabling our pupils to become lifelong readers. We believe that through supporting our children to learn to read, they will be able to read to learn for the rest of their lives. Reading is key for academic success. We believe in developing reading fluency and all comprehension skills coupled with promoting a love of reading so all of our children can access the delights and rewards that reading provides.
With these aims in mind, writing and reading opportunities are timetabled for all year groups.
Writing
The Writing Curriculum at Templefield is based upon the Statutory Framework for the Early Years Foundation Stage and the 2014 Primary National Curriculum in England. These documents provide a broad framework and outline the knowledge and skills taught in each Key Stage.
Daily phonics lessons for Reception and Year 1 support the teaching of spelling using phonics. Years 2-4 follow a whole school spelling scheme (No Nonsense Spelling) which follows the statutory requirements set out in the National Curriculum.
We have a whole school approach to the teaching of handwriting. We follow the ‘Teach Handwriting’ scheme and handwriting is taught at least weekly in every year group.
Daily English lessons are taught throughout the school and SPAG lessons may be taught discretely or be interwoven into lessons where skills are being built towards a final independent piece.
For composition, English is embedded in all curriculum areas and high standards in writing are modelled and expected in all subject areas. Opportunities for the children to explore language through speaking, listening and drama activities are given. Writing work may be based around quality texts where high quality examples can be examined and used as models for writing drawing on rich vocabulary and grammar. Writing lessons may link to a year groups ‘Big Picture’ for the term / half term or be stand alone to enable the children to write across a variety of genres including fiction, non-fiction and poetry.
Writing is celebrated across the school with displays of high-quality writing along with sharing successes for the children in our celebration assemblies.
We measure the impact of our Reading and Writing Curriculum using the Early Years Framework and
National Curriculum objectives. Children are assessed through formal and informal teacher
assessment against year group objectives and progress made is recorded and tracked
termly. Pupil progress meetings take place termly where the class teachers, the subject leader and SLT discuss progress and actions to address gaps in learning for individuals and groups of learners.
Statutory assessments and moderations are also used as additional assessment tools.
The reading and writing provision is monitored by the subject leader and SLT through learning walks, observations and book monitoring. Feedback and good practices are then shared with staff.
More able children will be provided with opportunities to extend their reading skills by exploring more challenging texts. For their writing, the more able will be challenged to edit and improve along with writing longer pieces to develop stamina with their writing. Differentiation will enable more able learners to be challenged within the context of a lesson to ensure their full potential is reached. High quality reading and writing materials will be used and reading and writing that exceeds expectations will be modelled throughout the school.
Children who are making less than expected progress are quickly identified so that appropriate support can be put into place. Progress will be monitored carefully to measure the impact of the support or intervention program used. Where progress continues to be a concern, the SENCo is consulted to plan further support.