English
Reading
The ability to read is an essential need of every child and is highly valued at St James. We strive to create life-long readers with an enthusiasm to share reading by creating and delivering a print-rich environment. Reading is taught daily through dedicated Reading sessions alongside writing, guided reading and storytelling sessions and are reinforced throughout the whole curriculum and complements our work on Talk for Writing. A range of reading techniques are used to reinforce the reading domains with a skills focus using VIPERS. We use the National Curriculum objectives and skills based progression maps to inform our planning and to ensure a coherently planned and sequenced journey towards fluency in reading.
Throughout the school we value Reading for Pleasure, and children have opportunities to enjoy reading and listening to books every day and to build their stamina in independent reading. We aim for all children to read widely and often across a range of authors and genres so that they develop a love of reading for life. All children have the opportunity to borrow phonic specific reading books, and visit the school library once a week where there are a range of fiction and non-fiction books as well as newspapers and comics. All children are encouraged to share books at home as this is a crucial part of their child’s reading journey. Children are expected to read at home at least three times a week and recorded in the child’s ‘Reading Record’ log book. We invite parents to various workshops and reading sessions throughout the school year to encourage their involvement with reading at home.
Reading VIPERS Question Stems KS1
Reading VIPERS Question Stems KS2
Writing
At St James CE Primary school we strive to build bright futures, enabling all children and adults to reach their full potential academically. Across school, we aim to further improve and develop writing through a sequenced, ambitious curriculum, especially for boys. In order to do this, we implement nationwide project called ‘Talk for Writing’, which has a proven record of accelerating children’s learning. It is developed by the author Pie Corbett and is a fun, creative yet also rigorous approach to develop confident writers. We have developed a whole school progressive writing overview, so our young writers are exposed to many genres of writing and they gain confidence because they are building on prior knowledge.
“If you can’t talk it, you can’t write it!” Pie Corbett.
The ‘Talk for Writing’ method, that we embrace from Nursery to Year 6, enables our children to imitate orally the language they need for a particular topic, before reading and analysing it, and then writing their own version. In other words, ‘Talk for Writing’ starts with enjoying and sharing stories and learning to tell a story off by heart with expression and actions. Once a story is learnt, the children are encouraged to adapt it to make it their own, for example by changing the characters or the setting. When they are confident, they write independently.
‘Talk for Writing’ is a very supportive and structured approach to writing. Children gain confidence and know what they need to do in order to get better through peer and teacher developmental modelling and marking, mainly within the lesson. We actively encourage reflection on learning. We invite parents in to school throughout the year to help to support and enjoy their children’s learning e.g. in parent workshops and experiencing life in class.
Our children say:
‘Talking before writing, and practicing my writing with the help of my teacher and friends, helps me to understand what I need to do to write a story of my own’.
Writing Intent, Implementation and Impact
Kinetic Letters
At St James we follow the Kinetic Letters scheme for teaching handwriting. Kinetic letters is a scheme that allows children to learn letter formation through movement. We learn letters by moving to make our bodies look like letters, saying the language as we make the letters and finally writing the letter using the language. Children are taught exercises to strengthen core muscles to help with their writing.
The children become familiar with the characters of Bounce and Skip, ‘brave’ monkey and ‘scared’ monkey, to help them recognise where to start to form each letter. In Reception the children read the stories of the adventures of Skip and Bounce and begin to learn the different letter families. Children begin to join letters from Year 2 upwards.
Kinetic Letters is taught alongside phonics to establish the close link between reading and writing.
