English

English

Intent

At Revoe Learning Academy, we believe all children have the right to learn to read and write as they are crucial, gateway skills that enable all other learning to be possible. We believe every child should be given the tools to develop into an enthusiastic and confident reader both at home and at school, moving from learning to read, to reading to learn, alongside reading for pleasure. Reading improves language and vocabulary, inspires imagination and gives everyone the opportunity to develop and foster new interests.

It is through high-quality teaching that our children’s love of reading, curiosity and thirst for knowledge is developed.

Implementation

At Revoe we have a well-established and rigorous programme for the systematic teaching of phonics across school. Beginning in EYFS, and moving on through KS1 and beyond, our children are taught in discrete, daily phonic groups that match their decoding, word reading and writing ability. As they continue their learning journey, and in liaison with our bespoke ‘Read, Write Inc.’ curriculum, children continue to develop their reading and writing skills, enabling our children to achieve in line with national expectations in the Phonic Screening Check. As the children progress, they continue to be regularly assessed by the reading leader to ensure any additional ‘one to one’ support is provided, ensuring no child falls behind their peers. Reading ability and fluency is assessed every half term as they move through school and children who require additional teaching to enhance their daily classroom diet are identified for support. Bespoke teaching is provided through targeted interventions delivered by trained reading teachers through Keep up Catch up teaching, Fresh Start lessons and Comprehension interventions.

All year groups have daily reading sessions which vary between ‘Talk through Stories’ for our youngest children, moving to individual, group and whole class guided reading lessons across school. All children at Revoe also enjoy daily story time sessions where novels and books are shared with the class and reading for pleasure is enjoyed by all.

As children graduate from this personalised teaching, they begin a journey toward reading and writing mastery. This is facilitated through our daily English lessons where a specialised novel approach is used to explore a wide range of genres and formalities. Carefully chosen, high quality texts ensure children experience a broad diet of fiction, information texts and poetry. Our English teaching is rooted in a teaching sequence that begins with immersing the children in the text, where opportunities for the children to talk about their understanding and comprehension of the texts is encouraged. Children engage in analysis of the key features, main ideas and themes, characters and plots. Through this we teach the key skills of composition, handwriting and spelling, punctuation and grammar whilst providing the children with many opportunities to write for a variety of purposes and audiences.

In collaboration with our KS2 English teaching, children will be immersed in daily guided reading sessions empowered by the challenging and coherent Ashley-Booth curriculum, used to support our teaching at RLA. We promote enjoyment through the creative use of high quality texts and a range of engaging activities. During these lessons, children will study their assigned class novel twice a week so they can scrutinise and discuss a text in its entirety from beginning to end. For the remaining three days, our children will examine and analyse a variety of related texts (fiction and non-fiction) from a plethora of successful authors as children refine and evolve their vital reading skills/domains. Regular teaching of whole class reading enables children to experience a broad range of texts in line with, and beyond, their reading abilities, ensures explicit teaching of vocabulary and comprehension skills whilst exploring possibilities to build cultural capital.

Central to learning is creating a life-long love of literature through reading for enjoyment, and at RLA we strive to develop our children’s imagination to open up a treasure house of wonder and joy for curious young minds.