English at Byers Green
Reading
“A book is a dream that you hold in your hand” Neil Gaiman
At Byers Green Primary School, reading is central to our whole curriculum. From the moment children enter our school, they are exposed to a wealth of high-quality texts and engaging reading experiences. We aim to foster a lifelong love of reading by promoting reading for pleasure and creating a culture where children choose to read for their own enjoyment. Through carefully selected texts we give children the opportunity to discuss new ideas and develop empathy with characters they meet along the way.
Our overarching aim is for our children to become fluent, confident readers, who develop a love of books and language that helps to equip them with the communication skills needed for their next steps in education and beyond.
As a staff, we are passionate about teaching reading in an exciting and progressive way; giving children the tools and skills required to be successful, independent readers.
Click here to read our Reading for Pleasure offer:
Byers Green Reading for Pleasure Offer
At Byers Green Primary School, we aim to ensure that all pupils:
- Will leave Byers Green Primary School as a reader
- Can read developmentally appropriate texts confidently and fluently.
- Choose to read for their own enjoyment and become passionate lifelong readers.
- Obtain a word reading knowledge alongside comprehension skills, in order to navigate texts and deepen their understanding of the world.
- Have the opportunity to read a broad variety of quality texts from different genres and authors.
- Have opportunities to read across the curriculum and use texts to discover and retrieve information.
- Acquire a rich and varied vocabulary.
- Can demonstrate strong speaking and listening skills and are confident in participating in debates and drama activities.
- Use the literature that they have explored to inspire their own writing.
Reading is implemented through a holistic approach, whereby children are reading across the curriculum.
Little Wandle, a rigorous systematic synthetic phonics scheme, is used to teach our youngest learners how to decipher the alphabetical code. Children in Reception and Key Stage One are taught the grapheme to phoneme correspondences, alongside key blending, segmenting and letter formation skills, to enable them to decode text and become a fluent reader.
More details of this can be found in our Early Reading and Phonics policy.
Alongside this, a text-based learning approach is deployed across the school. Teachers in all year groups use high quality texts creatively as a stimulus to teach reading, writing and speaking in English lessons. Pupils are immersed in exciting, thought-provoking and inspiring stories, poems and non-fiction texts from a range of different cultures and historical eras to ignite a love of literature.
More details can be found in our class overviews.
The ongoing assessment of children’s reading progress is sufficiently frequent and detailed to identify any pupil who is falling behind and intervention is used to support those children.
Teachers encourage reading for pleasure by:
- Reading aloud to children daily.
- Providing time and space for children and teachers to share their recommendations and opinions.
- Encouraging reading at home. Sending home books that closely match the letter-sound correspondences, but also able to take home an additional book from our school library or class reading corners to share.
- Reminding parents about the importance of reading and all children are encouraged to regularly read at home.
- Using Reading Corners in the classroom.
The intended impact of our curriculum offer for reading is to ensure our pupils are prepared for their life beyond primary school and their future education. Our pupils will:
- Apply their phonic knowledge to read with fluency.
- Read for both pleasure and purpose.
- Use the strategies taught, including life experience, to comprehend and respond to what they have read confidently.
Please see below the recommended reads for each year group:
Reception Top 100 Recommended Reads
Year 1 Top 100 Recommended Reads
Year 2 Top 100 Recommended Reads
Year 3 Top 100 Recommended Reads
Year 4 Top 100 Recommended Reads
Year 5 Top 100 Recommended Reads
Year 6 Top 100 Recommended Reads
Writing
At Byers Green Primary School, English and the teaching of English is the foundation of our curriculum. Our main aim is to ensure that every single child becomes primary literate and progresses in the areas of reading, writing, speaking and listening. We ensure that English is not only taught as a discrete subject but that it is embedded throughout the curriculum.
Through using high-quality texts, immersing children in vocabulary rich learning environments and ensuring curriculum expectations and the progression of skills are met, the children at Byers Green Primary will be exposed to a language rich, creative and a continuous English curriculum, which will not only enable them to become primary literate but will also develop a love of reading, creative writing and purposeful speaking and listening.
We want our children to write clearly, accurately and coherently, adapting their language and style in and for a range of contexts, purposes and audiences. We believe that all pupils should be encouraged to take pride in the presentation of their writing, in part by developing a neat, joined, handwriting style by the time they move to secondary school.
We believe that all good writers refine and edit their writing over time, so we want children to develop independence in being able to identify their own areas for improvement in pieces of writing, editing their work effectively during and after the writing process.
Children’s English work is focused around a high quality text and many reading and writing opportunities are taken from that book. Through engaging activities, the children will become familiar and confident with the chosen text and genre. Children will study the text type and build upon skills which they can apply when writing a specific genre. They are encouraged to explore a wide range of vocabulary and language which they can apply to their own work. Children then work on innovating – changing and adapting aspects of the text. Time will be spent planning writing for children to make decisions about the most effective choice of vocabulary or grammatical device to use in their writing. Time will be given at the end of each writing session for the teacher to provide feedback for the children to help them improve their writing in the following session. Feedback is often given live to give the children the opportunities to adapt and improve their work where necessary.
We use the Letter-join scheme as the basis of our whole school approach to handwriting, progressing from Early Years to Year 6.
Click here for our Handwriting policy
Pupils enjoy writing and use the features of different genres and styles. They can write for different purposes and audiences.
Skills progression (spelling, grammar and punctuation) throughout the school is evident in children’s books.
Pupils are adventurous with vocabulary choices, and they continue to grow a varied vocabulary throughout their time here.
Pupils will make good progress from their own personal starting points.
By the end of Year 6, children will be able to write clearly and accurately and adapt their language and style to a range of contexts, purposes and audiences.