English at dunholme st chad's 

'Open Hearts and Open Minds'

THE IMPORTANCE OF READING - Dunholme St Chad's

THis year, we will be working towards achieving the bronze award for the Lincolnshire Reading Pledge. WHAT IS THE LINCOLNSHIRE READING PLEDGE?

What is the INTENT of our English curriculum?

To enable everyone to flourish and achieve their ambition at our school, the English curriculum takes a multi-faceted approach that embraces local, national and global partnerships and will:

• Inspire and encourage all children to communicate freely and effectively in a variety of spoken and written forms; text types and genres; and for a range of audiences, through an inclusive teaching approach.
• Inspire children to read and write with confidence, fluency and understanding; orchestrating a range of independent strategies to self-check and edit.
• Encourage our children’s interest in a diverse range of high-quality literature books and inspire reading for pleasure.
• Inspire an interest in words and their meanings; developing a growing vocabulary in spoken and written forms to boost our pupils’ cultural capital and stimulate their motivation to pursue excellence in all that they do.
• Inspire and develop our children’s powers of imagination, inventiveness and critical awareness to encourage them to become ambitious and aspirational individuals.
• Take a cross-curricular approach to teaching English to ensure that our wider curriculum and our golden threads of: ambition and aspiration; continuity and change; and equality and diversity, are embedded and explored through reading, writing and spoken language.
• Enable children to use spoken language effectively to convey their ideas clearly, audibly and in ways which take account of their listeners.
• Develop children’s abilities to listen, reflect upon and evaluate their own and others’ spoken contributions and the language used, including during discussion and debate.
• Use the artistic practice of drama to develop children’s ability to adopt, create and sustain a range of roles; improvise, devise and script drama for one another and a range of audiences; rehearse, refine, share and respond thoughtfully to drama and theatre performances.

We believe that English is at the heart of the wider school curriculum and have therefore sub-categorised our intent, implementation and impact of this subject into the three main strands of: writing, reading and spoken language.

English Policy - Please click here to view our policy. 

Read, Write, Inc. Phonics Policy - Please click here to view our policy. 

Our English Teaching Sequence at Dunholme St Chad's 

READING FOR PLEASURE

At Dunholme St Chad's, we follow these four core principles in our teaching practice to promote a love of reading in school:

1. High-quality reading aloud for pleasure. This is in addition to reading aloud as part of literacy teaching. Reading aloud for pleasure enables children to access rich, challenging texts, offers a model for silent reading, prompts affective engagement and creates a class repertoire of ‘texts’ in common’ to discuss.
2. Talking about texts reader to reader. Talk about texts is essential to all literacy teaching, but this reader to reader talk is more informal, often spontaneous, and includes reciprocal book recommendations between children and teachers.
3. Choice-led independent reading time. Children need time to read and support for making informed choices from a range of texts that tempt.
4. Social reading environments in and around school. These are key to creating a strong reading culture. Successful environments invite readers to engage and share the pleasures of reading.

Additional Schemes to support English learning at Dunholme St Chad's:

Collins Big Cat Book Bands supports children's development of fluency after phonics through a book band scheme. Children work their way through Purple to Pearl books, so that we have fluent and confident readers leaving Dunholme St Chad's at the end of Year 6. 

More information can be found on their website: https://collins.co.uk/pages/collins-big-cat 

Read Write Inc. Spelling supports the progressive teaching of spelling across year groups 2-6, building upon knowledge gained from the Read Write Inc. Phonics Programme. 

Non-Negotiables each year group has a list of Non-Negotiable grammar and punctuation, which must be included in their writing by the end of the year. 

Focused Reading and Novel Study through VIPERS supports children's reading comprehension across Key Stages, so they are exposed to a wide variety of texts and question types. 

Focused Reading Explained

VIPERS KS1

VIPERS KS2

Enrichment:

English learning does not just take place within the classroom. It is enriched through its cross-curricular links, enabling experiences outside the classroom to inspire ideas within the classroom. This is done through:

• Using Educational Visits and experiences to inspire writing. For instance, Year 3’s local visit to Snipe Dales and Year 6’s visit to the Holocaust Centre is used to inspire writing when they return to the classroom.
• Reading is inspired through school events such as Book Week, in which children have the opportunity to partake in numerous activities across the school to immerse themselves in books and reading. 
• We have spoken to the children's author - Hannah Gold and gained insight about how to write an interesting novel.