English at Horsley

We believe that literacy is a fundamental life skill. English develops children's abilities to listen, speak, read and write for a wide range of purposes. Children are enabled to express themselves creatively and imaginatively as they become enthusiastic and critical readers of stories, poetry and drama, as well as of non-fiction and media texts. An understanding of how language works can be gained through exploring its patterns, structures and origins. Using and applying skills in speaking, reading and writing across a range of subjects and situations supports proficiency. By widening their knowledge, understanding and appreciation of English in all its forms, we seek to help pupils see the importance of English as a subject in itself but also as a key to unlocking their enjoyment and success in other subjects, ultimately leading them towards becoming confident, competent and fluent speakers, listeners, readers and writers for life.

Aims and Objectives:

• To enable children to speak clearly and audibly and to take account of their listeners.
• To encourage children to listen with concentration, in order to identify the main points of what they have heard.
• To show children how to adapt their speech to a wide range of circumstances and demands.
• To teach children effective communication, both verbal and non-verbal, through a variety of drama activities, including the communication of their ideas, views and feelings.
• To help them become confident, independent readers, through an appropriate focus on word, sentence and text-level knowledge.
• To develop enthusiastic and reflective readers, through contact with challenging and substantial texts.
• To foster the enjoyment of writing and a recognition of its value.
• To encourage accurate and meaningful writing, be it narrative or non-fiction.
• To improve the planning, drafting and editing of their written work, with emphasis on spelling, punctuation and grammar.

We select books, novels and stimuli with the children in mind and where possible, involve the children in these choices. These stimuli may be linked to the unit they are learning, children’s interests or current interests. In Key stage 1 the children will  picture books over a unit.  The reading and writing skills are in the files.

In the Autumn Terms Key Stage 2 will focus on reading one or two full novels, completely engaging in these texts - linking our other genres to this text where possible. In the Spring terms they focus on extracts, exposing children to as many different texts as possible. In the Summer term they explore a range of books and poetry in more detail. Throughout this work non-fiction is woven through the English work.

Reading and Phonics

What is Essential Letters and Sounds?

Essential Letters and Sounds (ELS) is our chosen Phonics programme. The aim of ELS is ‘Getting all children to read well, quickly’. It teaches children to read by identifying the phonemes (the smallest unit of sound) and graphemes (the written version of the sound) within words and using these to read words.

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Children begin learning Phonics at the very beginning of Reception and it is explicitly taught every day during a dedicated slot on the timetable. Children are given the knowledge and the skills to then apply this independently.

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Throughout the day, children will use their growing Phonics knowledge to support them in other areas of the curriculum and will have many opportunities to practise their reading. This includes reading 1:1 with a member of staff, with a partner during paired reading and as a class. 

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Children continue daily Phonics lessons in Year 1 and further through the school to ensure all children become confident, fluent readers.

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We follow the ELS progression and sequence. This allows our children to practise their existing phonic knowledge whilst building their understanding of the ‘code’ of our language GPCs (Grapheme Phoneme Correspondence). As a result, our children can tackle any unfamiliar words that they might discover. 

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Children experience the joy of books and language whilst rapidly acquiring the skills they need to become fluent independent readers and writers. ELS teaches relevant, useful and ambitious vocabulary to support each child’s journey to becoming fluent and independent readers.

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We begin by teaching the single letter sounds before moving to diagraphs ‘sh’ (two letters spelling one sound), trigraphs ‘igh’ (three letters spelling one sound) and quadgraphs ‘eigh’ (four letters spelling one sound).

We teach children to:

• Decode (read) by identifying each sound within a word and blending them together to read fluently

• Encode (write) by segmenting each sound to write words accurately.

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The structure of ELS lessons allows children to know what is coming next, what they need to do, and how to achieve success. This makes it easier for children to learn the GPCs we are teaching (the alphabetic code) and how to apply this when reading.

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ELS is designed on the principle that children should ‘keep up’ rather than ‘catch up’. Since interventions are delivered within the lesson by the teacher, any child who is struggling with the new knowledge can be immediately targeted with appropriate support. Where further support is required, 1:1 interventions are used where needed. These interventions are short, specific and effective.

Supporting Reading at Home:

• Children will only read books that are entirely decodable, this means that they should be able to read these books as they already know the code contained within the book.

• We only use pure sounds when decoding words (no ‘uh’ after the sound)

• We want children to practise reading their book 4 times across the week working on these skills:

               Decode – sounding out and blending to read the word.

               Fluency – reading words with less obvious decoding.

               Expression – using intonation and expression to bring the text to life!

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We must use pure sounds when we are pronouncing the sounds and supporting children in reading words. If we mispronounce these sounds, we will make reading harder for our children. Please watch the videos below for how to accurately pronounce these sounds.

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At the beginning of each academic year, we will hold an information session for parents and carers to find out more about what we do for Phonics, Reading and English at our schools. Please do join us.

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More support for parents and carers can be found here:

https://home.oxfordowl.co.uk/reading/reading-schemes-oxford-levels/essential-letters-and-sounds/  

Phonics: How to pronounce pure sounds | Oxford Owl

Learn how to pronounce all 44 phonics sounds, or phonemes, used in the English language with these helpful examples from Suzy Ditchburn and her daughter. Find more phonics help on Oxford Owl: https://www.oxfordowl.co.uk/for-home/reading/phonics-made-easy/ Help your child learn to read with books and flashcards from Read with Oxford: https://www.oxfordowl.co.uk/for-home/find-a-book/read-with-oxford/ What is Oxford Owl?

Horsley 100+ Books to Read Before You Leave

We have a collection of books that we encourage children to read before they leave Mapperley. These books are in 3 groups- Red, for younger readers, Blue more challenging and Green for older readers. These books are read in addition to reading scheme books and class readers.