English

Here at OLOL, we are all readers and writers. Our teaching of English is designed to instil in children a love of speaking, listening, reading and writing that will last them a lifetime. Giving pupils the key skills in English enables them to access material in all curriculum areas, and provides a foundation for their learning throughout their school career. We place a great emphasis on the development of spoken and written English, with the teaching of reading as a major priority beginning in the early years. Our aim is to foster the development of a literate, articulate child, who is able to approach both spoken and written forms of communication confidently.

In line with the National Curriculum, our aim is that all children:

• Read easily, fluently and with good understanding
• Develop the habit of reading widely and often, for both pleasure and information
• Acquire a wide vocabulary, an understanding of grammar and knowledge of linguistic conventions for reading, writing and spoken language
• Appreciate our rich and varied literary heritage
• Write clearly, accurately and coherently, adapting their language and style in and for a range of contexts, purposes and audiences
• Use discussion in order to learn; they should be able to elaborate and explain clearly their understanding and ideas
• Are competent in the arts of speaking and listening, making formal presentations, demonstrating to others and participating in debate.

Phonics and Early Reading

We believe that all children should begin to acquire the knowledge of synthetic phonics as soon as it is appropriate for their stage of development. As a school, we commit to one systematic synthetics phonics program: Monster Phonics. Daily delivery, along with identified individual support, ensures each child progresses through the program and succeeds in learning to read and thus being able to read to learn. All children who are working on the Monster Phonics program will bring home a Monster Phonics storybook to read at home. This will match their current phonological awareness enabling them to consolidate and practise their reading skills at home. All staff receive regular training to ensure delivery of the program is highly effective.

Reading for Pleasure

‘The simplest way to make sure we raise literate children... is to show them that reading is a pleasurable activity, and that means finding books that they enjoy, giving them access to those books, and letting them read them.’

Neil Gaiman

Across school, staff support children to identify books they enjoy by regularly sharing and discussing different texts with their classes that span a range of different genres. Children are encouraged to read regularly at home. All children are able to borrow books from their classroom libraries to read and enjoy at home whilst children and parents are regularly encouraged to recommend books to one another. We have now introduced a reading scheme in KS2 that follows on from the scheme introduced in EYFS and KS1. Reading Planet develops children aged 7-11 into confident and fluent readers with reading books for Stars to Supernova bands. Rising Stars worked with a team of top authors and illustrators to create books that capture the magic of ‘real’ children’s books. Everything is expertly levelled to ensure readers make essential progression as they journey towards the end of Primary School.

We believe that books should provide mirrors for the children in which they can see themselves reflected, and windows, through which they can look into the lives and stories of people who are different. Using this approach, we carefully select high quality books from a diverse range of authors that represent the unique community that we serve.

Writing

We believe that writing should have a purpose. Children are engaged in authentic writing opportunities that are linked to curriculum projects. These are further enhanced by additional units that are inspired by high quality texts. Grammar and sentence structure is modelled explicitly using exemplar texts as part of the writing process so that children can learn, practice and experiment with language structures in a wide range of different genres.

In January 2023 we introduced The Write Stuff approach to teaching writing across school.

The Write Stuff is based on two guiding principles: teaching sequences that slide between experience days and sentence stacking lessons. With modelling at the heart of them, the sentence stacking lessons are broken into bite-sized chunks and taught under the structural framework of The Writing Rainbow. Teachers prepare children for writing by modelling the ideas, grammar or techniques of writing.

Key aspects of The Write Stuff system include:

• The Write Stuff builds pupils’ confidence with sentence structure.
• The approach widens the repertoire of writing options for pupils.
• Pupils gain an understanding of the ‘whole’ piece that they are writing.
• Organisation of their ideas and cohesion between them is strengthened.

This results in carefully sequenced progression that ensures our children develop and practise key grammatical structures with high levels of repetition through school. This results in children who can write confidently and with a high degree of technical accuracy by the end of key stage 2.

Critique (centred around Whole Class Feedback) is built into our writing structure to enable the children to consider and improve the accuracy and effectiveness of their writing through a process of feedback, editing and redrafting. A final draft or presentation piece is created to showcase the children’s finished work.

Spelling

Our spelling system is used to compliment the Monster Phonics resources and, through a scheme by Jane Considine, implements a clear and systemic view for teaching spelling that provides children with life long strategies. It includes lots of exciting lessons where the children are encouraged to investigate different spelling rules and look for patterns within the English spelling system. Spelling lessons are taught on a two week cycle. 

Speaking and Listening

We believe that oracy forms the foundation for all other learning. It is central to forming relationships and acting as a cognitive tool. We model language and provide opportunities for our children to practise speaking clearly and confidently, through activities such as: role-play, discussions, presentations and debates.  Chatter Bags are introduced in Nursery, developing confident speakers from their very first setting experience at OLOL. We are determined that our children should develop a rich and varied vocabulary. This is achieved primarily through the sharing of high quality texts – we believe that reading to children has the greatest impact on their language development. This is supplemented by the wider curriculum experiences we plan for our children across school, including subject specific and technical language developed through projects, educational visits, and residential trips.