Literacy

We aim to enthuse and inspire everyone, whilst instilling a life-long love of literature.  With lively, interactive teaching we hope to produce confident, literate communicators who enjoy using their creativity.

Pupils learn to compose stories and gain an understanding of language.  We encourage pupils to achieve confident literacy and maintain their inspiration through reading, classroom discussion and role play.

These twelve strands give a clear sense of the important aspects of literacy that children need to learn.

1. Speaking
2. Listening and Responding
3. Group discussion and interaction
4. Drama
5. Word recognition, coding and decoding
6. Word structure and spelling
7. Understanding and interpreting texts
8. Engaging and responding to text
9. Creating and shaping texts
10. Text structure and organisation
11. Sentence structure and punctuation
12. Presentation

Home and School partnerships continue to play a critically important role in children's experiences and the contribution of adults in and out of school has a significant impact on their early education.

Regular and effective daily literacy teaching introduces children to new learning and to new ways of learning.  In regular handwriting lessons, children use handwriting patterns to establish rhythm and control in writing, using comfortable and efficient pencil grip.  They will practise handwriting in conjunction with spelling and independent writing, ensuring correct letter orientation, formation and proportion.  Teachers provide additional support for children whose fine motor skills are slow to develop, to avoid the consequence of them becoming frustrated with this aspect of writing.

Children experience a range of high-quality fiction, non-fiction and poetry, including a number of ICT and other visual or multimodal texts and texts which relate to other areas of the curriculum.  Teachers plan for early reading knowledge and skills to be taught explicitly through shared and guided reading and discrete word-level teaching sessions.  Children apply what they have learned in guided reading and when reading independently from texts.