English
At TGPASJ, English is at the heart of our curriculum, providing children with the skills required to access all areas of our curriculum. We are determined to instill a love of language within all our pupils to allow them to become confident communicators and talented readers and writers. We strive to achieve this through the study of high-quality, diverse texts as well as ensuring vocabulary is explored and explicitly taught to as this is key to academic success.
Reading and Phonics
Pupils are taught to read and write using Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised, which is a systematic synthetic phonics programme. Phonics begins in Nursery and Reception and children, following the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised progression to ensure they master the alphabetic code and learning can remain in their long-term memory. Starting in Reception, children’s home reading books match their phonics learning and understanding. They learn to read their book in school allowing them to then practise and rehearse their fluency at home.
Support for Parents can be found here: Little Wandle Letters and Sounds- For Parents
Throughout Year 2-6, whole class reading sessions takes place throughout the week, where core texts are read and explored through different reading skills such as prediction, retrieval and inference.
Writing
Intent for writing:
At Tudor Grange Primary Academy St James, we are passionate about ensuring every child can write, and sees themselves as a writer. We strive to ensure that high-quality education in English will teach pupils to speak and write fluently, so that they can communicate their ideas and emotions to others, and through their reading and listening, others can communicate with them. Our aim is to promote high standards of language and literacy by equipping pupils with a strong command of the spoken and written word. We want every child to acquire a wide vocabulary, an understanding of grammar, and knowledge of linguistic conventions for reading, writing, and spoken language, in a creative, diverse, and purposeful way. We want all pupils to be able to write clearly, accurately, and coherently, adapting their language and style in and for a range of contexts, purposes, and audiences. We support students to progressively improve their transcription and composition skills, and from this to plan, revise, and evaluate their writing.
Implementation of writing:
To enable our children to write effectively, and with clarity, we teach writing using “The Write Stuff,” by Jane Considine. We understand that this is a schema, and not a scheme: an effective way to make the complex cognitive load required to write well simple, sticky, and explicit. This approach is being implemented from Year 1 to Year 6 from September 2023, to allow children to build the substantive and disciplinary knowledge required over time to write effective sentences, with the grammar and vocabulary required explicitly modelled, to lead to confident independent writing. Over time, children will write a broad range of fiction and non-fiction texts, from a variety of themes and inspirations.
The Write Stuff’ brings clarity to the mechanics of teaching writing. It is introduced through the ‘Writing Rainbow’, using three zones of writing. These three essential components consist of: the FANTASTICs (ideas); the GRAMMARISTICs (tools); the BOOMTASTICs (techniques).
The ‘Writing Rainbow’, symbols are used to support children with their writing journey and to ensure that all children can use them in context as they move through school.
In addition to the ‘Writing Rainbow’, ‘Writing Laundry’ is a tool used to support children with editing their writing. The idea behind the laundry is that children have a ‘pupil friendly’ visual reminder of the key components for building a sentence. The ‘Vocabulary Laundry’ lists the words that pupils must spell accurately. The ‘Punctuation Laundry’ outlines the progression of marks that pupils need to acquire. The ‘Sentence Laundry’ the sentence constructions that pupils need to craft to guarantee they have a wealth of different structures to apply in their writing.
Impact of writing:
Although ‘The Write Stuff’ is newly implemented, we are already seeing a difference in our children’s confidence to write. Children are engaged with writing and feel well supported through using a small steps approach to writing. Children are beginning to become confident editors of writing, using ‘The Writing Laundry’ to support them with this.
Here are some examples of the writing our pupils are now producing:
Here are some examples of the working walls in classrooms:
