At West End we follow the National Curriculum for English and teach Reading and Writing skills incorporating Spelling, Grammar and Punctuation along with Speaking and listening.
In teaching these areas of English, we aim to incorporate creative teaching and learning approaches to inspire our children to become enthusiastic readers and writers. We aim to create purposeful opportunities for children to communicate through spoken and written language for a range of audiences. We do this by allowing our children experiences such as ‘wow’ days, theatre visits and trips to a variety of places to engage interest
Reading
We value reading as an essential part of children’s learning at West End. We believe that promoting the enjoyment of reading is of equal importance to teaching important reading skills. Children take part in a reading lesson every day where they develop reading skills in decoding and comprehension. They read a range of age appropriate texts from fiction, non-fiction, poetry and play scripts. Children also spend time understanding and developing their vocabulary at the beginning of each genre.
As well as understanding the meaning of words in a book, children learn to talk about the characters, settings and main events, learn to predict what will happen next and summarise what has already happened. The also learn how to find and locate information in books and use this information to infer why things happen.
The school library is an important resource for children in all areas of the curriculum, which can be used to select books to read for pleasure and find information. Classes use the library regularly and it is also open every lunch-time to give the children the opportunity to change their books. We have some enthusiastic librarians that run the library at lunch time.
Home Reading
Home reading is very important and takes high priority at West End. Children have access to a wide range of different books and are expected to read at least 4 times a week.
In Reception and KS1 children’s home reading books are linked to the phonics lessons in school. Children can change their books daily.
In KS2, children’s home reading books are linked to their reading ability. There are also KS2 phonic books with a higher interest level for those children that are working on building their reading skills.
Each half term a child from each class that has made an amazing effort to read at home is awarded the Star Reader badge to wear.
Phonics and Spelling
Please see the website for more details on Reading books, Phonics and Spelling
Writing
We provide children with a range of opportunities for writing in all areas of the curriculum for a range of purposes and audiences. Children are given opportunities to write different types of texts from different types of fiction to non-fiction such as recounts, instructional texts and non-chronological reports. Children are encouraged to write daily in all areas of the curriculum. They may complete short writes and plan ideas then produce a longer piece of writing over a number of days. We believe it is important to evaluate, edit and re-draft at all stages of the writing process and teach children how to be independent in these self-checking skills.