READING

At Cotford St Luke Primary School we strive to instil a love of reading into our pupils. We have daily opportunities for independent reading in KS2 and alongside an adult in KS1. Each class has a variety of books that children can access independently to explore in an age appropriate way. Guided reading takes place across the whole school. When learning to read we primarily follow the  Oxford Reading Tree book scheme, we do however use several other reading schemes to support this. In Reception, the children are introduced to the different skills, in the summer term before moving to small group Guided Reading in Year 1. In Year 2, the children may be introduced to Whole Class Guided Reading in preparation for the move to KS2. When exploring comprehension activities we explore VIPERS to ensure children have a clear understanding of the text they are reading. VIPERS is an acronym for Vocabulary, Inference, Prediction, Explanation, Retrieval and Sequence or Summarise. They are key areas that children need to know and understand in order to comprehend a text fully. Please see examples below if you would like to explore them with your children at home.

Key Stage One

https://www.literacyshedplus.com/en-gb/resource/reading-vipers-question-stems-ks1

Key Stage Two

https://www.literacyshedplus.com/en-gb/resource/reading-vipers-question-stems-ks2

We strongly encourage reading at home with your child and books are regularly changed in school. If your child is a reluctant reader, you could try some of the following:

• Explore magazines, newspapers, supermarket signs- reading materials in different formats.
• Exlpore Audiobooks- these allow children to listen to a story and enjoy the storyline.
• There are plenty of websites that give free access to E-Books. Oxford Owl would be a good one to explore https://www.oxfordowl.co.uk/for-home/find-a-book/library-page/. Some children may engage more in this format.

PHONICS/SPELLING

Throughout Early Years and Key Stage One pupils, engage with the Letters and Sounds phonic programme (http://www.letters-and-sounds.com/). Here children learn the skills they need to be good readers and writers. Children are taught in small groups when necessary to allow them to make the best progress. In Key Stage Two, we are following published spelling guidance developing sequences of lessons to teach age appropriate spellings.

Interventions

Where children have gaps in their phonic knowledge or have missed parts of their learning, interventions are put in place to allow the children to progress and fill those gaps.

Resources

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbO6vGBkx48 – Forming sounds correctly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvMyssfAUx0- Tricky Words Song (Phase 2). There is also one available for Phase 3 and 4.

You will also find plenty of phase-appropriate Phonics games on the Letters and Sounds website- remember to ask your child’s teacher which phase they are on before playing games.

WRITING

At Cotford St Luke Primary School, we want all our children to be fantastic writers, taking pride in what they have written and having the opportunity to write for different purposes. We strive for our pupils to present their work in a neat format and encourage our Key Stage Two pupils to strive for their pen license. We expose the children to different genres of writing exploring Fiction, Non-Fiction and Poetry every term. We will use a model text to explore this style of writing before exploring the different features and writing a version for themselves.

Writers of the Month!