Weaving a journey as a reader and writer at Brooklands Farm
At Brooklands Farm Primary School we weave our English learning journey throughout a broad and balanced curriculum. We follow the National Curriculum and our overall aim is that children leave primary school as confident readers and writers.
At Brooklands, we know that reading and writing must weave together in order to develop children who are confident and fluent readers and writers. When teaching writing, reading still remains at the heart of learning and children are engaged and immersed in a wide range of high quality texts that inform, entertain, and help children to make sense of themselves and the world around them.
Writing
At Brooklands Farm Primary school, we weave a life long learning journey, entwining positive personal wellbeing with high aspiration for academic success. Children are given opportunities to: express their opinions, ideas and beliefs; develop their creativity and secure the technical and grammatical skills of writing through our writing curriculum. Once children have completed the RWI phonics and writing program to lay the foundations of accurate reading and writing , we use Pie Corbett’s ‘Talk for Writing’ teaching sequence when planning and teaching writing across the school.
The journey of a writer through our Talk for Writing structure ensures children revisit text types focussing on the effect skills have within a piece of writing. This embeds grammar teaching within a creative writing structure. This strategy creates opportunities for children to be open to new ideas, skills and structures that they learn from reading new literature. We grow these skills through carefully structured lessons, where they move from oral rehearsal to oral innovation, before transcribing these skills in order to ensure they are embedded in the long term memory. Embedding the belief that they are powerful writers, putting pen to paper and expressing themselves, using their knowledge obtained along the way.
We believe that it is paramount that children learn, rehearse and recite texts to help develop their spoken literacy. Through using this approach, children are able to develop their knowledge of stories, poems and non-fiction texts whilst internalising ambitious language and complex sentence constructions.
Whilst the technical, grammatical structures of writing are fundamental to developing high academic success, at Brooklands Farm we also believe that developing a love of writing is imperative. Whole-school creative writing days are planned to encourage excitement and a love of writing across the school; children are also given regular opportunities to write for real-life purposes, where they can experience the power of their written words and find their own writer’s voice.
Link to Talk for Writing website for parents to find out more about the structure. https://www.talk4writing.com/about/
Writing Overviews
Threshold Concept Progression of Skills & Text Overview
Reading
At Brooklands Farm, reading is at the heart of our curriculum and children are given a wealth of experiences weaved into their journey. We promote a love for reading across the school and our aim is to develop each individual as a confident, lifelong reader. Reading begins at the earliest stage when children enjoy looking at books and hearing stories being read to them. The cognitive load of the reading curriculum at Brooklands Farm is designed as a cumulative curriculum. We teach reading through two dimensions – word reading and comprehension. It is essential that teaching focuses on both dimensions- different kinds of teaching are needed for each. Our reading scheme offers high quality, supportive and enriching literature for the children to enjoy, blending seamlessly and moving on from our phonics programme. This in turn creates positive, fluent readers, who engage with different types of texts. We believe that reading should encourage a positive view of the written text as a source of pleasure as well as a valuable source of ideas and information to support all areas of the curriculum.
During comprehension, children build on knowledge learnt in previous years with the difficulty of the text increasing throughout the school. We want to create a communal approach to reading, which allows the children to enter discussions about characters and events in the text relating them to other books they have read and their own lives. Reading is weaved throughout our curriculum giving the children the opportunity to expand their vocabulary in all subjects. At Brooklands Farm we use Accelerated reader and myON to ensure and support children to have the widest range of books freely available to them and are learning and progressing in their own developmental stage.
Independent reading books support children at an individual level and are carefully chosen by teachers to aid and challenge our pupils. We use a variety of different materials and stimulus to enable our children to develop a love of reading.
We want the children of Brooklands Farm to leave us as confident, fluent readers who begin their time with us by ‘learning to read’ and leave us ‘reading to learn!’
Progression across our Primary School is here
Supporting your bilingual child to read – watch the video here
Reading Overviews
Year 1 Parents introduction to Read Write Inc. Watch the RWI video here.
Phonics
At Brooklands Farm Primary School, our pupils learn to read and write effectively and quickly using the Read Write Inc. Phonics programme. Read Write Inc begins in the Spring term of Nursery and continues into Foundation, Year 1 and 2.
Children learn to:
- Decode letter-sound correspondences quickly and effortlessly, using their phonic knowledge and skills.
- Read common exception words on sight
- Understand what they read
- Read aloud with fluency and expression
- Write confidently, with a strong focus on vocabulary and grammar
- Spell quickly and easily by segmenting the sounds in words
- Acquire good handwriting
Read Write Inc is also used for any pupils in Years 2, 3 and 4 who need to catch up rapidly. In Years 5 and 6, children who require further support with reading follow Read Write Inc. Fresh Start.
Phonics Overview
Curriculum
National Curriculum for English
Progression across our Primary School in Grammar is here
Performance Poetry
Please click here to view our school performance poetry curriculum site.
