English

In every aspect of the curriculum, English can be found. Our children become confident speakers, listeners, readers and writers and are given opportunities to use and practise these skills in every subject. The English curriculum and the teaching of it has never been more high profile.

Here at Livingstone we place a great emphasis on the importance of reading, whether this be through active phonics sessions, inviting book areas, book clubs, stimulus books and simply reading for pleasure. We encourage and nurture a love of reading and support children of all ages and abilities to access the wonderful world of books.  We have purchased lots of new books to make our library and book areas interesting including graphic novels which are popular with our reluctant readers. We also involve the children in lots of fun activities such as World Book Day, The Wondrous Book Club and author visits.

To support early reading, Nursery, Reception, Year 1 and Year 2 (Key Stage One) have a daily phonics session. We keep these sessions as active as possible using games, songs and texts to teach the ‘Letters and Sounds’ phonic phases. We usually teach phonics in small groups so that we can ensure the best possible progress. From September 2023 we will be adopting a phonics scheme called 'Monster Phonics'.

As the children start to read, they will be given phonetically decodable books according to the phonics phase they are working on.  We believe this will support them to reinforce their decoding skills and support improved progression in phonics.  Children will read Monster Phonics books at school but will take home a range of phonically decodable books matched to the stage at which they are learning.  This is continued in Year 1 until children are secure at Phase 5.  At this point they also read books from our main scheme in order to develop comprehension.

Each half term a quality text (usually linked to the class topic theme) is used as a stimulus for English teaching.  Using this text, teachers will teach vocabulary, grammatical skills, spoken language skills and provide long and short writing opportunities. This teaching culminates in pupils producing a comprehensive narrative followed by and a non-fiction text, which incorporate the grammatical skills taught, new vocabulary introduced and use the genre specific structure and features.

For further information, the Spelling, Grammar and Punctuation scheme of work can be downloaded below, along with guides on Phonics at home and Reading at home produced by the Tameside Loves Reading team.

https://www.booktrust.org.uk/books-and-reading/bookfinder/

https://classroomsecrets.co.uk/free-home-learning-packs/

https://www.englishmastery.org/

https://www.literacyshedplus.com/en-gb/browse/free-resources

https://www.literacyshedplus.com/en-gb/browse/free-resources

https://2simple.com/purple-mash/

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