Heyes Lane Primary School

During the reading part of the lesson, the children explore well-chosen class novels, extracts and model texts ‘as a reader’ to improve their reading skills in different ways. They develop: the skills to sound and blend words; knowledge of common exception words; the skills to retrieve and record facts; an ability to explore vocabulary within the context of a range of texts; and the skills to infer and support inferences with evidence. Texts are linked to wider themes and broaden the children’s knowledge of vocabulary. A love of reading is extended beyond English lessons: our teachers enjoy reading to their classes and the children continue reading for pleasure at home, developing a life-long love of reading.

In this part of the lesson, the children explore class texts ‘as a writer’. They investigate grammatical structures and practise sentence types within the context of reading and their wider theme. Through guided grammar work, the children are able to collaborate to rehearse sentences and collect ideas for the writing part of the lesson. They are empowered by gaining a secure understanding of grammar, punctuation and spelling and are then able to apply these skills independently.

The writing part of the lesson provides children with the opportunity to apply their grammatical skills and communicate their ideas, knowledge and understanding of wider themes and subjects. This part of the lesson builds towards an outcome with a clear purpose and audience. We use talk for writing and drama skills to plan, rehearse and gather ideas. The children then produce a first draft and are given feedback from the teacher or their peers. They are then given the opportunity to edit and improve their writing. Their final step is to take pride in presenting a published piece.

Writing expectations are high for all and our children want their writing to be the best that it can be. They learn how to draft and edit their work and they develop the ability to do this independently. Their reading and writing skills are applied to the wider curriculum.

The daily teaching of core skills empowers pupils to be able to make choices about their reading and writing and apply skills independently. Making choices about characters, viewpoints, levels of formality, word choices and sentence structures provides pupils with the opportunity to reach a higher standard. 

A range of hooks are used to generate enthusiasm, interest and excitement in English learning. The immersive links to wider themes and the use of mantle of the expert create meaningful and exciting contexts for writing. Pupils write for a range of purposes and audiences. This enables them to develop the writing skills required to prepare them for secondary education and beyond.

Writing outcomes are engaging and purposeful. Pupils enjoy using class texts as a reader and as a writer to gather ideas, collect words, research, explore sentence types and plan writing. Daily Grammar Time sessions are linked to our learning and are used to teach core writing skills. These sessions are active, collaborative and pacey, which leads to fluency and secure understanding.

As children progress through school, they are taught editing skills and become autonomous in checking their work. They take pride in publishing or sharing their work and are given the opportunity to showcase their writing skills and share their writing with the wider school community. As ethical citizens they write to persuade and to raise awareness of world issues such as the use of palm oil and working conditions in the past.

In Nursery children are introduced to Phase 1 where they learn to identify sounds and rhyming patterns.

In Reception Little Wandle (Revised Letters and Sounds) is used to teach systematic synthetic phonics. Children learn new sounds each day and develop blending skills to read words. They read a fully decodable reading book linked to these sounds 3 times a week in their reading practice sessions. These sessions also develop prosody and comprehension skills.

In Year 1 Little Wandle (Revised Letters and Sounds) continues and develops the children’s knowledge of systematic synthetic phonics. Reading practice sessions continue three times a week for each child and the fully decodable books progress through to Phase 5. Prosody and comprehension skills continue to be taught at each child’s phonic level.

In Year 2-6 children read a book banded at their reading level. At Heyes Lane we acknowledge individual children’s reading ability will develop at a different pace, we promote fluency and consolidation by re-reading and re-visiting texts. Book bands are carefully mapped to year groups to provide progression as children develop in their reading skills.

Children will be taught phonics/spelling as discrete sessions using Little Wandle/No Nonsense Spelling according to individual needs. Children will learn a set of spellings at home each week. These will be set as an assignment on Spelling Shed. Spelling lists will contain a balance of the year group’s commonly misspelt words; spelling patterns and rules; and theme-based vocabulary. Children who are working significantly below age related expectations will be supported by additional adults and through differentiation to allow them to fill gaps identified from PIVATs assessments. They will receive more personalised SEND support including precision teaching and toe by toe. Children will become autonomous in checking spellings. They will use highlighters to identify words that they need to check. They are taught how to check spellings using a dictionary or an online spellchecker.