Intent:
English is at the heart of our curriculum. Our primary aim is to increase children’s confidence, enjoyment and ability in reading, writing and communication. Through the early acquisition of language and continual development of vocabulary, our children build on knowledge and skills sequentially as they progress through school. We promote our children to develop a love of reading and a passion for English, enabling them to become lifelong learners.
Implementation:
Our aim at Robertswood School is to enable children to become fluent and independent readers and writers, who can use a range of texts to build vocabulary and style. Drama and discussion are central to the teaching of English, enabling children to express themselves and experience a range of roles and experiences. Children can then select language accordingly, depending on the audience and purpose of the piece they are creating. Pupils are taught a range of techniques to enhance the quality of their prose, such as drafting and refining ideas, using varied sentence structures and creating dialogue that shapes characters and advances action.
From the EYFS, synthetic phonics is used to support the learning of reading, writing and spelling. It aims to build children’s speaking and listening skills in their own right as well as to prepare children for learning to read by developing their phonic knowledge and skills. We encourage our children to develop a regular reading habit, through the use of an extensive colour-coded reading system.
At the heart of our English curriculum, is the use of high-quality children’s literature, selected based on the evidence-based approach of CLPE (The Centre for Literacy in Primary Education). The books included within our curriculum allow children to explore a wide variety of text genres, as well as being inclusive by representing a range of backgrounds, cultures and communities.
We believe every child should be able to see themselves within the books that form their education. To empower a child to write confidently is to enable them to have a voice and make themselves heard.
Impact:
Through our high-quality teaching of English, we aspire for all children to reach age related expectations or above by the end of each year group.
In each lesson, teachers assess pupils’ understanding through both verbal and written feedback. Teachers subsequently assess if pupils have met the objective and then act appropriately through small group catch up, 1:1 support or an additional lesson on a skill.
English is assessed termly and data is recorded and tracked to identify strengths and areas for development. Reading is assessed through reading comprehension tests, benchmarking and through teacher knowledge gained during other reading opportunities. Writing is assessed based on at least two pieces of independent writing over the course of each term. Phonics assessments are done for all children in EYFS and KS1. Focus children are identified for additional phonics interventions into KS2.
In addition to formative and summative assessment, the English leads and SLT complete work scrutiny and learning walks to gain a wider picture of English learning and its impact across the school.
Grammar and punctuation are crucial aspects of techniques for children using cohesive writing. Ultimately, grammar and punctuation is taught alongside an approach to writing which is based on developing pieces depending on the purpose and audience.
Phonics is a body of knowledge that is necessary for children to learn in order to be able to read and write fluently and confidently. At Robertswood School, we teach phonics using a DFE approved programme of systematic synthetic phonics. Children are taught the correspondences between letters and sounds (graphemes and phonemes) as well as the skills of blending the individual sounds together to read and segmenting words into their individual sounds which is needed for spelling.
Phases are the way that the complex alphabetic code of English is broken down to teach sounds in a certain order. There are six phases, with each phase building on the skills and knowledge of previous learning. We concentrate on Phases 1 and 2 in our Nursery, Phases 3 and 4 in Reception, Phase 5 in Year 1 and Phase 6 in Year 2. There are no big leaps in learning. Children have time to practise and rapidly expand their ability to read and spell words. They are also taught to read and spell ‘tricky words’ which are words with spellings that are unusual or that children have not yet been taught or words which cannot be decoded using a phonic strategy. These include words such as ‘to’, ‘was’, ‘said’ and ‘the’ which cannot be sounded out and therefore need to be learnt by sight for reading and spelling.
Activities are divided into seven aspects, including environmental sounds, instrumental sounds, body sounds, rhythm and rhyme, alliteration, voice sounds and finally oral blending and segmenting.
Learning 19 letters of the alphabet and one sound for each. Blending sounds together to make words. Segmenting words into their separate sounds. Beginning to read simple captions.
The remaining 7 letters of the alphabet, one sound for each. Graphemes such as ch, oo, th representing the remaining phonemes not covered by single letters. Reading captions, sentences and questions.
On completion of this phase, children will have learnt the "simple code", i.e. one grapheme for each phoneme in the English language.
No new grapheme-phoneme correspondences are taught in this phase. Children learn to blend and segment longer words with adjacent consonants, e.g. swim, clap, jump.
Now we move on to the "complex code". Children learn more graphemes for the phonemes which they already know, plus different ways of pronouncing the graphemes they already know.
Working on spelling, including prefixes and suffixes, doubling and dropping letters etc.
Tricky words are words that cannot be ‘sounded-out’ but need to be learned by heart. They don’t fit into the usual spelling patterns. In order to read simple sentences, it is necessary for children to know some words that have unusual or untaught spellings. It should be noted that, when tackling these words, it is important to always start with sounds already known in the word, then focus on the 'tricky' part.
High Frequency Words are words that recur frequently in much of the written material young children read and that they need when they write. The following website provides free online games, flashcards and printable resources to help your children learn to read and spell these sight words.
At Robertswood we encourage the children to use the correct terminology within phonics and we would encourage you to also use them when supporting your child with phonics at home.
The Phonic Terms
Phoneme: The smallest unit of sound you can hear within a word, e.g. c/a/t, sh/o/p, t/ea/ch/er. The word phoneme refers to the sound, not the letter(s) which represent the sound in writing. For example, in the word gate, there are three phonemes (g-long ay-t); in school there are four (s-c-long ooh-l). There are 44 phonemes in English, which can be split into two groups:
24 consonant phonemes: for example, ‘b’ (bang, bubble), ‘m’ (monkey, hammer), ‘ch’ (chat, match), ‘ng’ (bang). You can see in the examples that the sounds (the phonemes) can be written in different ways (different graphemes).
20 vowel phonemes: there needs to be at least one vowel sound in every word. There are short vowel sounds (apple, egg, bread, kit, gym, octopus, wash, umbrella, won), long vowel sounds (such as in rain, tray, tree, me, light, kite) and other vowel sounds (such as book, could, fork, board, chair). These sounds can be written in different ways (different graphemes).
Grapheme: a grapheme is a ‘symbol’ of a phoneme – it’s a letter or group of letters representing a sound and we use the letter names for this. A one letter grapheme is the ‘c’ in cat where the hard ‘c’ sound is represented by the letter ‘c’; a two letter grapheme is in leaf where the long ‘ee’ sound is represented by the letters ‘ea’; a four letter grapheme is contained in through where the letters ‘ough’ make the long ‘oo’ sound. To complicate matters even more, some sounds (phonemes) can be spelled with different graphemes (spellings). For example, the hard ‘c’ sound can be spelled with ‘c’, ‘k’ or ‘ck’ graphemes (as in ‘car’, ‘kite’ and ‘lock’); the long ‘ee’ sound can be spelled with lots of different graphemes, such as ‘ee’ (Leeds), ‘ea’ (beat), ‘ie’ (chief), ‘ei’ (ceiling), ‘e-e’ (theme).
Digraph: Two letters which together make one sound, e.g. sh, ch, ee, ph, oa.
Split digraph: Two letters, which work as a pair, split, to represent one sound, e.g. a-e as in cake, or i-e as in kite.
Trigraph: Three letters which together make one sound but cannot be separated into smaller phonemes, e.g. igh as in light, ear as in heard, tch as in watch.
Segmentation: Hearing the individual phonemes within a word – for instance the word ‘crash’ consists of four phonemes: ‘c – r – a – sh’. In order to spell this word, a child must segment it into its component phonemes and choose a grapheme to represent each phoneme.
CVC: A word containing the sequence ‘consonant, vowel, consonant'). For example, cat and even chat because the ‘ch’ grapheme works together to make a single sound (phoneme) – you wouldn’t say c-h-a-t)
Blending: The merging together of the separate sounds in a word. The separate sounds (phonemes) are spoken in order, all through the word, and are then merged together into the whole word - this is a vital skill for reading. For example, the three phonemes ch-a-t are blended to make chat, whilst th-r-ee blend to make three.
Adjacent consonants: Two or three letters with discrete sounds, which are blended together e.g. str, cr, tr, gr. (previously consonant clusters).
Comprehension: Understanding of language whether it is spoken or written
Decode: to read words.
Encode: to spell words.
Supporting your child with phonics
When you talk about sounds to your child, use the phonemes (the letter sounds). The reason for this is that sounding out words is practically impossible if you use the letter names: dog doesn’t sound like ‘dee-oh-gee’.
When saying the sounds of b, d, g, j and w and other letters, you might notice the 'uh' sound which follows each (‘buh’, ‘duh’...). It’s hard to say the sound without it but do try to emphasise the main letter sound and avoid saying the ‘uh’ too much. In some letters, avoid the ‘uh’ completely (say ‘mmm’ rather than ‘muh’ and ‘sss’, not ‘suh'). This is to avoid your child spelling a word like cat and wanting to add the ‘uh’ sound (c-u-a-t).
If you would like any further guidance in the correct pronunciation of the sounds or to play interactive games that support phonics, please visit the following website:
Consonant Sounds 1
Consonant Sounds 2
Vowel Sounds 1
Vowel Sounds 2