English

Writing

At North Borough Junior School we believe that all children should be able to confidently communicate their knowledge, ideas, understanding and emotions through their writing. At North Borough and St Paul's Federation we use the Talk for Writing approach to develop confident, skilled writers. Talk for Writing is well-structured and clearly sequenced and teaches children how to be writers – not just how to write. It supports children to be able to generate ideas, draw upon their reading and write confidently for a variety of audiences and purposes.. Progressive whole school planning ensures both quality and coverage, using a bank of model texts that stretches from Reception to Year 6. We highly value the importance of oracy and ensure that our English lessons are rich in high quality spoken language and vocabuary, story telling and oral reheasal of ideas. 

Talk for Writing encompasses a three-stage pedagogy:

​‘Imitation’ - where children get to know a text really well by orally learning it, exploring it through drama and then reading it for vocabulary, comprehension and writer tools.

​‘Innovation’ - shared writing, with a strong and systematic focus on securing the basics of handwriting, phonics/spelling and grammar in relation to what is needed for the text type being taught. Pupils use ideas and structures to co-construct new versions of the model text. 

‘Invention’ - where teachers help pupils to draft, edit and publish their own independent versions.

These tasks aim to improve writing ability by giving pupils an understanding of the structure and elements of written language.

 

Writing Skills Progression Document

Reading 

At North Borough Junior School, we believe that a rich English curriculum should motivate our pupils to become life-long readers: embracing reading for pleasure; experimenting with ambitious vocabulary; and writing for a variety of purposes. This is nurtured through the children designing and creating their own reading incentive programme ‘Book Busters’ which rewards children for reading as often as they can. Our overarching aspiration is to ensure every child leaves us as a confident reader and is prepared for secondary education.

Teachers work hard to plan and use a wide variety of high quality picture books, novel, informations texts and poems which are language rich and are interesting for the children. Our aim is to inspire our pupils through exciting texts which spark their interests and encourage them to ask questions to gain further meaning. Where possible this links to the topic in curriculum or science to help the children develop a deeper understanding of what they are learning. Teachers are not afraid to adapt the Reading curriculum to engage our diverse groups of pupils, modelling that different children enjoy different books and, by extension book choice is personal one.

We believe that our pupils need to develop secure skills in reading and work closely to support pupils joining us from KS1, aiming to ensure there is consistency in the approach to teaching of reading skills. We value the importance of quality teaching of early reading skills and quickly identify pupils who need continued support in this stage of learning to read. We offer continued phonics teaching using Read Write Inc Phonics as an intervention for pupils who have not yet completed the programme whilst in Year 2 or pupils new to the English language. 

 

Reading Skills Progression Document 

 

Phonics

 

 

Mrs Worrall and Mrs Nicholls (English Subject Leaders)