English

English

At Rocks Park our aim is to ensure that all pupils develop the art of spoken language, the ability to read and understand with fluency and to be able to write accurately and coherently through the teaching of English as set out in the National Curriculum. These are the skills we believe are essential in enabling our pupils to succeed throughout life.

Early Reading: The teaching of phonics in Key Stage 1 at Rocks Park follows a systematic synthetic phonics programme called Supersonic Phonic Friends. This is supplemented with a variety of resources to ensure children’s phonic attainment allows them to become fluent readers as they progress through Early Years and Key Stage 1. Reading books are sent home weekly, these are banded to follow the recommend teaching sequence meaning that children are regularly practising the phonics they are learning in school at home. Summative phonics assessment takes place at the end of each phase whilst formative assessment by teachers and TAs takes place daily to ensure any misconceptions or gaps in children’s phonics are addressed immediately.  Through phonics teaching children are taught the phoneme (the sound a letter makes) and corresponding grapheme (how you write the letter) for each letter of the alphabet and combinations of letters which are called diagraphs and trigraphs. The children are given immediate opportunities to apply this new knowledge by segmenting (sounding out words) and blending the sounds back together to read words in phonics sessions and through individual and group reading. 

Through shared and guided reading we use quality children’s texts across all year groups to encourage both reading for pleasure and as a way to teach grammatical features that children can use in their own writing. These texts enable pupils to expand their vocabulary and to broaden their understanding of the world.  We use ‘Talk 4 Writing’ to help pupils develop a wider spoken vocabulary and sentence structure as well as allowing pupils to develop their understanding of the structure of stories.

To find out more about how English is taught in each year group, please visit our class pages and look at the medium term planning.