Barncroft Primary School
At Barncroft Primary school we want to inspire pupils to become inquisitive, fluent readers, articulate writers and confident speakers. To do this we have developed our curriculum to allow our children to develop these skills and apply them in a variety of different ways.
Reading is at the heart and soul of our school. We love reading and we want every child to leave us not only being able to read but with a real passion for books. It could be argued that learning to read and write is one of the most important skills that your child will learn whilst at school. Everything else depends on it, so we put as much energy as we possibly can into making sure that every single child learns to read and then applies this to writing through meaningful everyday activities.
We first start teaching children to read when they are in Reception through our phonics programme, Read, Write Inc. Once children are secure on the first couple of sounds, they will begin to take a colour book banded book home. These have been matched closely to the child’s phonic knowledge and we aim to make sure that this book is fully decodable for them. These books will gradually get harder as they increase their phonic knowledge.
However, learning to read is about more than just learning to blend sounds together. It’s about understanding what is happening in the text, developing a reader’s voice, using inference to really work out what a character means and making links across a text. Therefore, your child’s class teacher will only move them onto the next book band once they are able to confidently read and comprehend the text.
In addition to their coloured book band book, your child will also bring home a book from the library. In many cases, these books may be above your child’s current reading level. These books are brought home purely for enjoyment, so the children can experience a wide variety of texts and stories that interest them, explore different authors and begin to get a feel of what they like as a reader. These books are perfect for sharing at bed time or exploring with friends or family.
Writing is an accumulation of lots of different skills. At Barncroft, we teach our writing through 3 phases.
Our first phase is all about immersing the children into the text and genre they are writing for. They will explore texts, complete role plays and drama work. They may even look at poetry, film clips and music all aimed at immersing them in the world they are writing about. In this phase, we will investigate vocabulary and look at how the words we choose will be impacted by things such as audience and purpose.
In our second phase, children start to look more at the skills they will need in order to complete their writing task. Over a number of days, they will develop these skills and start to apply them, always linking back to what they learnt in phase one.
Our final phase is about pulling everything together and starting to write and edit our final piece.
This model for writing is then incorporated across the curriculum. All of our writing opportunities are linked to the children’s topic areas so they can see that writing isn’t something which only happens in English lessons but is something which can be used and applied across a variety of topic areas.
