English

The teaching of English encompasses reading, writing, spelling, handwriting, and speaking and listening. English is taught daily throughout the school.

All children in the Early Years Foundation Stage (Nursery and Reception) and Key Stage One (Years one and two) have daily phonic sessions. Phonics is a crucial part in the early years of learning to read as we believe it lays the foundations for successful reading, as well as giving the children confidence to become independent readers and writers.

We use ALS Phonics, which is a systematic, synthetic phonics programme. This approach demonstrates structure and routine and begins as soon as the children start school.  Our early reading books are phonetically decodable and are organised according to the phases and grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPCs) covered in them. The teachers ensure children practise reading with books that are decodable for them at that stage of their learning. We use Phonic Bug Club books to provide the core of the school’s guided reading scheme and Collins: Big Cat, decodable books for the children to take home to read to their parents and carers. Our home reading books closely match the phonic knowledge of the children. This allows our children to keep practising at home the learning that has taken place at school.

In addition to this, the children choose another book to take home from the school or classroom library. This book may often be at a reading level above that of the child. Its purpose is to be a ‘read aloud’ text, in which parents are encouraged to read it to their child, in order to promote a deeper enjoyment of reading, as well as introducing them to new vocabulary and genres of writing.

As part of the Literacy curriculum, the children take part in weekly guided reading sessions. These sessions allow the children to develop their reading and fluency. They are carefully planned to help the children develop their comprehension and understanding of fiction and nonfiction texts. There are also opportunities each week for the children to read individually.

At Inglehurst Infant School, we aim to teach writing in a range of genres, fiction and nonfiction, in line with the National Curriculum.

Writing is taught through the use of quality texts and other stimuli, such as short animated films. These expose the children to high level vocabulary, inference, a range of punctuation and characterisation. Each text is purposefully selected to promote a love of reading, engagement and high quality writing from the children. Class discussions and role play involving the texts, also help to develop and enrich the children’s own writing skills.