Reading
Reading is a fundamental skill for our children. The curriculum is designed to enable children to develop their reading skills. All lessons across the curriculum should incorporate elements of reading. Teachers plan their English lessons based upon high quality challenging texts and novels, most of which link to the termly topics the children are studying.
Whole class reading sessions are introduced at the end of Year 2 (when children are ready for these) and continue in Years 3 to 6. This allows children to continue to develop their reading skills and exposes them to increasingly complex extracts and complete texts.
Our class reads in KS2 are shared using a programme called Just Read. These books are pitched just above the level of the highest readers in the class and they address aspects of the plagues of the reader.
Individual reading takes place regularly at our school, with the children who are less confident with reading receiving individual reading sessions daily. All children have access to our well stocked school library. This allows them the freedom to make text choices related to their own interests.
Writing
At Heath Mount, we use the Highters Heath approach for teaching writing. This encompasses a three-stage pedagogy: ‘Immersion’ (where pupils learn and internalise texts, to identify transferrable ideas and structures), ‘Sentence Work’ (where pupils focus on developing their knowledge and skills of sentence structures), and ‘Independent Writing’ (where pupils use the skills taught to create original texts independently). These tasks aim to improve writing ability by giving pupils an understanding of the structure and elements of written language.
There are four purposes to writing (to entertain, to inform, to persuade and to discuss). In Years 1 and 2, only two text types are focused upon. The number of text types studied however builds up over time (see below) and over the course of their time at our school, our pupils experience the full range of these. The content of writing lessons is nearly always linked to the topics that our pupils are studying in their history and geography lessons. This allows our pupils to develop further and to consolidate their 'topic' knowledge within these curriculum areas.
During the week, writing is taught though focused lessons on the development of handwriting (using the Letter Join Scheme); spelling (using lessons from Spelling Shed); vocabulary, grammar and punctuation (VGP) and composition (covering the writing elements identified in the previous paragraph) Please see the structure of a week below.
At Heath Mount, we have reduced the number of writing objectives each year group has to complete in a year to approximately 20. These are taught and embedded throughout the year. The expectation is that 100% of pupils, use these 100% accurately, 100% of the time by the end of the year. This is achieved through precise teaching, repeated practise of the skills and effective feedback.