English

Subject Leader: Mrs. E. Saunders

Key documents:

Throughout every stage of our pupil's time at Ireleth St Peters, English lessons equip the children with essential literacy knowledge and communication skills that allow them to unlock their full potential across all other areas of school life and beyond. Throughout school, our Christian values underpin every aspect of school life. In English, we apply our values to encourage the children to be creative, explore diversity and nurture curiosity in order to make progress, preparing them well for the future and developing and articulating their understanding of the world around them.

We make use of well resourced classroom spaces, that reflect our values and high standards particularly to ensure that a love of reading permeates throughout the school. Each classroom in school has an appealing and prominent reading area with high quality texts available, class books are shared daily and independent reading is celebrated. Additionally, we are fortunate to have extensive grounds, that allow us to utilise outdoor learning approaches across all classes.

A broad and balanced English curriculum is covered throughout school where our weekly planning incorporates all areas of English. Reading and writing objectives are taught through daily English sessions, using a range of teaching and learning strategies, which emphasise interactive and collaborative learning styles and provide children with frequent opportunities to produce independent work. In writing we follow the Talk for Writing framework throughout school, which gives pupils the opportunity to study a range of non-fiction, fiction and poetry genres throughout the year, building on and developing their prior learning in these areas.  Whilst applying a cross curricular approach, linked to termly class topics, the children study the features of high quality model texts that they have read and apply them to their own pieces of writing. Please see below, for more information about Talk for Writing. 


All children in EYFS and Key Stage One participate in daily phonics sessions. As of September 2021, we follow the Read Write Inc Phonics scheme which is a systematic, synthetic phonics programme that has been validated by the Department for Education. Children in our school are grouped into small phonics sets, each led by a different member of staff to allow them to focus on children's specific phases of learning. Please see below for more information about Read Write Inc. As children enter Key Stage 2, they take part in daily spelling, punctuation and grammar sessions. 


Talk for Writing

Talk for Writing is a framework used for teaching writing, based upon the principles of how children learn. It encourages the children to imitate the language they need for a particular topic orally, before reading and analysing it, and then writing their own version. Each unit taught, works through 3 phases called the 3 I's:

Imitation- where the children use story maps to learn the text off by heart using actions, many of which are based on Makaton sign language and look at the features of a text to create a toolkit.
Innovation-the children use their own ideas to plan and write their own version of the modelled text.
Invention- the children create their own independent version of the story. 


                                                                                         

 

At the start of a unit the children complete a piece of writing called a Cold Task- this is the chance for the children to show what they already know, and for teachers to assess what learning needs to take place in the unit. After the unit has taken place, the children complete  their writing in the invention stage known as a Hot Task. This helps us to quickly identify the progress that each child has made.  

There are lots of high quality stories recommended to use alongside Talk for Writing that you may enjoy sharing with your child, please click here to see a list: 

Talk for Writing Reading Spine

 

Take a Look at Talk for Writing in school! 

Imitation..                                             .                Innovation....                                                     Invention....





Read Write Inc

Read Write Inc is a systematic, synthetic phonics programme, used in our school to teach the 40+ phonic sounds used to create all the words we see. Phonics teaches children to recognise how sounds hear, and look when written down (graphemes). Children are then taught to blend these sounds into words before recognising the sounds written in alternative ways. Read Write Inc uses small rhymes and illustrations to allow children to remember the sounds and how to form them. They are based around a character called Fred the Frog who is used to encourage the children to ' Fred Talk' (blend words). The children are taught according to which phase of phonics they are currently learning and are given writing and reading tasks that use the sounds to match this level of learning. 

  Further information about Read Write Inc for parents can be found here:

Please see the video below for lots of useful information for how phonics takes place in school and how you can support your child at home. 



Please see the video below to see how each of the phonic sounds are pronounced: 



There are lots of Read Write Inc resources available to help your child to practice phonics at home. 
In school, the children will read a particular colour of book matched to the set of phonics that they are working on. Free e-books that match your child's phonics set colour can be dowloaded here.

This, along with the class login will be shared with you by your child's teacher.
Home practice sheets for the sounds in each set can be downloaded by clicking the links below:

Set 1 Practice Sheets

Set 2 Practice Sheets

Set 3 Practice Sheets



 

 

Our Vision

At Ireleth St Peter’s, through values rooted in Christian teaching, our community nurtures and enables positive foundations for life. Our distinct Christian ethos permeates throughout ISP.

Working together in successful partnership, our school family embraces the common goal of inspiring every child to reach their fullest potential, through God’s love.