English

Miss Wells, the school’s EYFS teacher, held a phonics workshop for parents on 15.11.22. Thank you to those who attended – we had a great turnout! Workshops will be arranged regularly, but if you are ever unable to attend, please do not hesitate to get in touch. We will endeavour to support you in supporting your child’s learning. Details of future workshops will be added to the class’ Class Dojo page.

• BBC Nursery songs
  A collection of nursery songs from the Early Learning series Listen and Play and Playtime, both of which are currently available on iplayer and as podcasts
• Book Trust
  Suggested books for children, advice on how to read with your child, book lists, fun games, competitions to win free books, Children’s Book Club etc.

• Love Reading
  Expert recommendations and opening extracts of books.

• Oxford Owl
  Phonics advice and access to free E-Books. Free to register.

• Phonics
  A useful website featuring free resources for KS1 (and the option of subscribing)

Others – mainly American, so be aware of different spellings/pronunciations!

• Non- fiction Magazine
  A non fiction magazine for younger children, which they can follow along with as it is read to them.

• Starfall
  Some free content on here for beginning readers.

• Storyline
  Storyline Online features accomplished actors and actresses reading some of their favourite children’s books. Each story comes with a free Activity Guide and can be viewed on YouTube or SchoolTube.

• Storynory
  Storynory features a collection of original, fairytale, and classic children’s audio stories.

We love our whole school annual visit to the theatre at Christmas time (oh yes we do!). We believe pantomime develops children’s concentration and nonverbal communication and enables them to put action and thought together effectively. It enables children to use their imaginations and understand that any idea they have can be a unique, creative and remarkable one!

During the final week before our Christmas break, Father Christmas visited us all! We were thrilled to receive a wrapped gift. We all received a carefully chosen book from his little elves.

Thank you, Father Christmas!

These fantastic Year 6 pupils each entered into Fulwood High School’s Halloween Creative Writing Competition and impressed the staff there (and perhaps terrified them, too?!)

Well done, superstars!

We encourage a love of books and reading. We provide the children with opportunities to enjoy and share books with others.

Our whole school provides the pupils with a language rich environment enabling pupils to access reading of different types on a daily basis. We have a brand-new, vibrant library which each class loves to visit on a weekly basis.

Teachers model reading strategies during shared reading sessions, whilst children have the opportunity to develop reading strategies and to discuss texts in detail during guided reading sessions. All English units of work follow the teaching sequence of reading and responding -> reading and analysing -> gathering content -> planning and writing. This sequence means that children become immersed in a genre and cover a variety of reading skills before writing their own example. Independent reading provides time for assessment and 1-1 teaching. There are engaging, daily phonics lessons in Reception and Key Stage One and these are continued into Key Stage Two where necessary through targeted interventions.

A range of reading schemes are used to support early readers. These include Collins Big Cat for Letters and Sounds, Phonics Bug, Floppy’s Phonics and Smart Kids for Letters and Sounds. We intend the children to read widely and this includes a range of fiction, non-fiction and poetry. The books are fully aligned with the progression of Red Rose Phonics. This means that the children are only introduced to books that have letters, sounds and tricky words that have been taught previously. Because of this approach, children have opportunities to practise their phonic skills and will gain greater fluency in decoding and comprehension as a result. It also means that the children will experience success as readers – something that we delight in as a school!

In addition to our fully decodable reading books for our earliest readers, we also have a wide range of book banded books to choose from once the children have completed Phase 5 of their phonics learning. The difference between each band is gradual so that children will not experience difficulty when moving from one to the next. Details of your child’s Book Band colour and targets are inside the front cover of their Reading Record.

It is really important that children develop their comprehension skills alongside their ability to read the words on the page so you may find that your child is able to read the words fluently but continues on the same Book Band colour for a while to enable them to focus on developing their understanding. Class teachers assess the children’s reading on a regular basis and will change their Book Band colour only when they are confident that both the comprehension and word reading targets have been fully met. Please discourage your child from seeing the Book Bands as a race through the colours, but help them to understand that each band will offer a range of books which will help them in developing different reading skills.

Teaching assistants support reading activities to ensure that children have more frequent opportunities to read with adults.

We arrange exciting activities in school to promote a love of reading and celebrate World Book Day, National Storytelling Week, Vocabulary days and lots more. We invite local authors into school and enjoy performances by professional theatre groups to illustrate stories.

We encourage all children to share a book at home with their adults. We believe that this not only helps to develop inferential skills, but also supports a lifelong love of reading. Our children tell us how much they love story time at home. It’s a warm and loving experience where the children have your undying attention as they anticipate the next part of the story. Reading with your child helps their development and helps them learn early literacy, aids imagination and helps them to express and understand their emotions. The endless benefits of reading should not be underestimated.

From the moment the children join Greenlands Community Primary School, they are encouraged to write for a range of reasons and audiences. At all times we aim to ensure that they have authentic reasons for writing and understand the importance of this skill.

Within each year group the children are taught the skills to write clearly, accurately and coherently for a range of contexts, purposes and audiences.

There is an emphasis on developing the pupils’ competence in spelling, handwriting, composition, vocabulary, grammar and punctuation which they are encouraged to apply to different types of writing.

Children have regular handwriting sessions and are taught to use a legible, cursive style. At the beginning of term, a handwriting baseline assessment is carried out with pupils’ achievements celebrated in handwriting assemblies across the year.

Our aim at Greenlands is to teach the children to develop a range of personal strategies for learning spellings, and for checking and proofreading spellings in their own writing.

We teach spelling to the National Curriculum requirements which enable pupils to:

• develop a range of personal strategies for learning new and irregular words.
• develop a range of personal strategies for spelling at the point of writing composition.
• develop a range of strategies for checking and proofreading spellings after writing.
• use further prefixes and suffixes and understand the guidance for adding them.
• spell some words with ‘silent’ letters.
• continue to distinguish between homophones and other words which are often confused.
• use knowledge of morphology and etymology in spelling and understand that the spelling of some words needs to be learnt specifically.
• use dictionaries to check the spelling and meaning of words.
• use the first three or four letters of a word to check spelling, meaning or both of these in a dictionary.
• use a thesaurus.
• proofread for spelling errors.

We are committed to the continual development of pupils’ confidence and competence in spoken language. This underpins the development of reading and writing. We encourage children to express opinions and present ideas in both formal and informal situations. Drama, role play, discussion and debate bring language to life and are important in teaching self- expression.

The following link takes you to the Book Trust’s list of 100 best books for children from the last 100 years: the ultimate booklist to read before you’re 14.

In 2021, a team of experts put together the list, broken down into four age bands. This makes it easy to find age appropriate books for your child to love!

https://www.booktrust.org.uk/books-and-reading/our-recommendations/100-best-books/