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Learning to read at Whitkirk
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English
Miss Dougan - English Leader and Miss Lynch - Reading Leader
Reading
Reading is at the heart of our curriculum. Children learn to read through encountering challenging texts, which form the basis of each half term’s English learning from Reception to Year 6.
We follow the Read Write Inc. (RWI) programme to get children off to a flying start with their reading and writing. RWI is a structured programme, which integrates phonics, comprehension, writing, grammar, punctuation, vocabulary, and handwriting. It helps us to create a consistent approach across our school as we all work together to ensure our children are confident readers and writers. Children begin learning phonics from when they start in Reception, and all our staff members are fully trained. Whilst children are in the early stages of their reading, we teach children to decode, building their word recognition through phonics sessions, and we support children to develop a love of reading and build their language comprehension through whole class sharing of stories. As children progress through school, these begin to intertwine and children engage with a weekly comprehension lesson in place of RWI sessions.
RWI sessions in action
Whole class texts are carefully selected to include a range of authors, text types and genres.
Developing a love of reading
A selection of our class reading corners (more pictures in our gallery below)
We aim to instill a love of reading in our children and hope that they will leave Whitkirk as avid readers, who are able to access all areas of the curriculum confidently.
- All pupils enjoy a daily storytelling session delivered by their class teacher.
- Each classroom has its own special reading area.
- Teachers share their love of books with the children, recommending new and old favourites, and showcase a range of fiction and non-fiction texts, which link with our core theme and curriculum focus.
- Secret Reader - in KS1, family members are able to secretly sign up to come into school and share a story with the rest of the class. This causes lots of excitement as children eagerly await who will be entering through the door!
- All pupils have a scheduled time to visit our school library.
As well as lots of practice at school, children are expected to read at home at least three times per week. We ensure that individual reading books are accurately matched to the sounds that children know.
Whitkirk Waterstones - our school library - click images to view larger
Writing
Our writing curriculum aims to develop ambitious and articulate authors. We use two processes to develop writing from Year 1 to Year 6. In KS1, the Talk for Writing programme is used to support children in being able to produce effective pieces of independent writing, through engaging the learners, learning a text by heart, planning clearly, and writing for a purpose. In KS2, writing is inspired by our half-termly class text, and where possible, this is linked to theme that the children are studying (for example, children read Street Child during their Victorians study) to support children’s vocabulary development and contextual knowledge. All pieces of writing are then published by the children and form either a wonderful display or a special bound collection of writing which is celebrated in the classroom reading corner.
Spelling
We teach spelling to build on children’s knowledge and understanding of phonics. Each week, following the RWI Spelling scheme, children learn key spellings and rules, which they must apply to increasingly ambitious vocabulary.
View our gallery
