English

Vision

At Mendip Green Primary School our English curriculum promotes language development which enables pupils to communicate effectively and to appreciate the richness, magic and power of the written word. It enables children to see language as a source of pleasure and enjoyment and use it to develop powers of imagination, creativity and inventiveness.

Programme

We follow the Primary National Curriculum for all aspects of the English Curriculum. Developing a love of reading, and the importance of this for our children both now and in the future, lies at the heart of our English curriculum.

• Our ELAN English curriculum is made up of progressively sequence learning journeys for Year 2 to Year 6. These are led using a quality text as the stimulus, this may be fiction (including poetry) or non-fiction.
• In Early Years and Year 1, our English curriculum is focused upon early reading, early writing and phonics so that all children have developed an understanding of and confidence with:
  • storytelling
  • vocabulary
  • sentence sense
  • comprehension
  • handwriting
  • phonics

Reading

Reading is at the heart of our curriculum. We recognise and value the importance of developing confident readers with a love of reading, in all its forms. We passionately believe in children hearing authors and illustrators talk about the craft of writing and illustrating and strive to provide as many opportunities as possible for this to happen, especially through visits to our school.

Staff enthusiasm for reading and knowledge of classic and current children’s literature is also a high priority. Beyond the English lesson, children are exposed to and immersed in a wide range of stories, poems and other texts through book events, library visits and story-time.

When teaching reading, we use a phonics-first approach, with texts matched to each child's individual reading stage.  However, a child's joy of reading and books encompasses so much more than the ability to decode. 'Three ways to read a book' are modelled to our youngest children so that they are able to access and enjoy a wide range of beautiful picture books and immerse themselves in the magic of story-telling.

• Reading the pictures
• Reading the words (for phonetically decodable books only)
• Retelling a familiar story

Book corners celebrate our reading culture and offer a cosy book nook in each class. Our library is a special place, designed and developed by the children with librarians and Reading Champions actively involved in maintaining the space, developing its stock and creating a book buzz across the school community.

Mendip Green has received two National Awards for our work on reading for pleasure.

Writing

We believe in immersing our children in texts through reading and analysing the skills of an expert writer. This is important as through this emersion, children become aware of the language skills of a writer and use this as a model for their writing. Using this model, children develop greater competence in the conventions of spelling, punctuation, sentence structures and text organisation.

Through our curriculum, children will develop:

• a strong command of the written and spoken word
• the ability to write clearly, accurately and coherently, adapting their language and style in and for a range of contexts, purposes and audiences
• the confidence and competence to produce high quality writing
• a good understanding of grammar and punctuation and its use in effective written communication

Phonics

At Mendip Green, we follow the approach to phonics teaching as outlined in the 'Extend Letters and Sounds'.  This is a validated systematic synthetic phonics (SSP) programme. Children begin this programme in EYFS and continue it into the first part of Year 2 where it is superseded by the Spelling Programme. The Phonics Programme is a 9 step approach to the systematic teaching of phonics. The central principles involve:

• Children having knowledge of the alphabetic code;
• Children having the skill to blend to read;
• Children having the skill to segment to spell;
• Children understanding these as a reversible process

The Phonics Programme links reading and writing to phonic knowledge and has been of great benefit for our children. The knowledge children acquire to support their development of early reading is equally as relevant for their development as a writer. It is important that children are given equal opportunities to practise and apply their phonics skills in writing and reading tasks so that they can understand the relationship between decoding skills for reading and encoding skills for spelling. These skills are underpinned by the modelling and teaching of good listening skills, combined with frequent opportunities to improve children’s visual and auditory memory and their ability to sequence. These skills are developed through the teaching of activities to promote phonological and phonemic awareness in young children before they embark on a systematic phonics program.

Alongside daily teaching of phonics, activities and opportunities are provided within the learning environment for children to apply and consolidate their learning.

When teaching reading, we use a systematic, synthetic phonics approach. To support this, we also teach and value strategies such as learning sight vocabulary and looking for context when reading unfamiliar vocabulary.  It is vital that early reading is undertaken through the use of phonetically decodable texts and, therefore, we ensure that the first books the children receive to read are matched to the phonic step they have secured. Specific texts, selected from a a variety of reading schemes are used in school, including: Bug Club, Floppy's Phonics, Jelly and Bean, Collins Big Cat and Oxford Reading Tree. Phonetically decodable books are organised by phonetic step with a clear progression that is in line with our phonics programme. This allows us to ensure that each child is accessing books which are matched to their current level of need and complement their phonetic development. The correct level of text will both inspire and enthuse, whilst nurturing their reading ability. This ensures that children will progress rapidly with both their decoding and understanding of a text.  Understanding is the key to enjoyment; text comprehension starts straight away in EYFS with class story time.

Our aim is to enable each child to gain a love for reading and writing which will last a life time.

Spelling

“My spelling is Wobbly. It’s good spelling but it Wobbles, and the letters get in the wrong places.”

Winnie the Pooh, A.A.Milne

At Mendip Green, we use the North Somerset Learning Exchange's 'YEAR 2 – 6 SPELLING PROGRAMME’. We believe that spelling needs to be actively taught. This programme allows for systematic, explicit and interactive teaching of spelling which encourages children to investigate and understand how our spelling system works.

By building on children’s knowledge of phonics (how the 26 letters of the alphabet represent approximately 44 sounds in the English language in approximately 140 different ways) children will have the tools to spell 85% of root words. In Year 2 and Key Stage 2, we teach children the morphology of words (how words are grouped into families, related to each other by a combination of form, grammar and meaning). By mastering basic morphological principles, children will have a way of working out the spelling of over half a million words.

The remaining words are irregular.  We use etymology (the stories behind the spelling of certain words) and graphic strategies to help children to learn these spellings