Gloucester Road Primary School

Gloucester Road
Nursery & Primary School

English

It is our aim that every child in our school will learn to read and write regardless of social and economic circumstances, ethnicity, the language spoken at home and most special educational needs or disabilities. The first stage in helping children to become confident readers and writers, and to enjoy both reading and writing is teaching them the key skills that they need. Writing sits on a sea of talking and reading. Before children can write fluently they need to be able to communicate their ideas orally with confidence. All teachers are trained in CLPE’s Power of Reading, Pie Corbett’s Talk for Writing and Reading and Sounds Write Phonics. At Gloucester Road we teach Sounds Write with fidelity and draw on elements of each of the other approaches to the teaching of writing and reading to provide pupils with best education in English possible.

We aim to do this by providing children with the following:

 

 

 

Writing in EYFS

Writing is initially taught through the systematic teaching of synthetic phonics, which is supported through Sounds Write.

In the Early Years, children are encouraged to attempt their own emergent writing and their efforts are valued and praised. As their phonic knowledge increases, this will be reflected in their writing. At the same time, their knowledge of key words and sentence construction is supported through reading and writing activities, including shared reading and writing, independent writing, Talk for Writing and Talk Boost.

Writing in Key Stage One and Two

 We use a range of teaching approaches to help develop children’s writing, including:

 Modelled, shared and guided writing

Our curriculum coverage follows the National Curriculum 2014 and ensures that a range of text types are taught from Years 1 to 6.  During each term, we teach poetry, non-fiction and narrative text types – please see our Writing Road Map for more information on this.  Oral rehearsal strategies are used regularly, particularly in the younger year groups, as we strongly believe, “If you can say it, you can write it.”  In order to improve language and communication, Talk Boost is used as an intervention where necessary.  Alongside explicit English lessons, we include additional writing experiences where they link to our current theme and children also have the opportunity to write independently through our integrated approaches at the end of every term.

 

Phonics Policy

Our Writing Policy and Writing Road Map are currently being updated and will be available here shortly. 

 

 

Reading

At Gloucester Road reading is at the heart of everything we do, both our Early and DEEP curriculums are centred on reading high-quality texts, mainly from CLPE’s Power of Reading, of which all our teachers are fully trained in. We also combine this with Pie Corbett’s Reading Spine, books selected from the Reading Teacher’s = Reading Pupils project (Cheltenham Literature Festival), alongside books that have been carefully selected by our English Lead. All texts relate directly to learning and in most cases impart significant content and knowledge related to the projects and/or lead learning across the curriculum.

We believe that every child should leave school as literate learners who a passion for reading for pleasure. We aim to do this by providing children with the following:

 Reading Policy

 

 Handwriting

We teach a cursive style of handwriting using the system Letterjoin.  Our current handwriting policy, which is in line with recommendations from the British Dyslexia Association, can be found here.

 

Handwriting Policy

 

 

Reading Interventions

When children are not reading at a level inline with the expectations for their year group we are quick to put interventions in place to help and support them to make accelerated progress with their reading. Some of the interventions we provide are:

 

 

 

 

 

 

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