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English

Phonics Teaching at Hope Community School

At Home Community School we use the fantastic programme Read Write Inc to teach our children their phonics.

Read Write Inc, developed by Ruth Miskin, provides a structure and systematic approach to teaching phonics. It is designed to create fluent readers, confident speakers and willing writers. 

The phonemes (sounds) are taught in a specific order (not alphabetically). This enables children to begin building words as early as possible. There are 3 sets of sounds for children to learn where they should have learnt them all by the end of Year 1 and then consolidate them in Year 2. Each sound is taught with a rhyme to remember the sound... E.g oa-goat in a boat. 

Your child will meet Fred Frog who can only talk in sounds. Fred is used for Fred Talk (blending) and Fred Fingers which is used when identifying the sounds to spell different words. 

Alongside the phonic speed sound lesson, your child will read a phonetically decodable book to practise their Fred Talk and Fred in your head and comprehension skills. 

To find out further information visit: http://www.ruthmiskin.com/en/parents/ 

 

Reading at Hope Community School

We are passionate and committed at Hope School that there is a reading culture built where pupils want to and find their own love of reading to read a wide variety of texts. Reading is taught every day and all children are encouraged to read at home too. At school, teachers model a love of reading by choosing different texts to read to the pupils for 10minutes at a time in the day. Pupils love to get snuggly during this time by lying down to enjoy the story.

Reading is taught through Read Write Inc sessions, guided reading sessions, whole class reading texts and Book Talk. Book Talk is a way where children are able to read together and then discuss the text using Fantastics, Stylistics and Analystics. Children are encouraged in these sessions to become book detectives and dig deep to answer both literal and inference questions. High quality texts are also used in English lessons to drive different writing genres.

Spelling at Hope Community School

Spelling is an integral part of children’s reading and writing development. As children develop spelling competency, their confidence and independence in writing will increase.

Reception and Year 1 are taught spellings as part of their daily phonic lessons using Read Write Inc.

Year 2 and children in Key Stage 2 are taught spelling daily, using the Read Write Inc Spelling programme with interventions for those children who need a boost with their phonics learning.

Writing at Hope Community School

Our writing curriculum ensures that all children have plenty of opportunities to write for different purposes and for a range of audiences. We endeavour to provide ‘real’ purposes for writing so that children are engaged and excited by their writing experiences at school. Having high quality texts is another way in which we drive our writing across all Year groups. Through the use of high quality text, pupils deepen their vocabulary and writing style knowledge. As a school we have adopted "The Write Stuff" by Jane Considine to bring clarity to the mechanics of writing.  "The Write Stuff" follows a method called "Sentence Stacking" which refers to the fact that sentences are stacked together chronologically and organised to engage children with short, intensive moments of learning that they can then immediately apply to their own writing.  An individual lesson is based on a sentence model, broken in to three chunks:

  1. Initiate section – a stimulus to capture the children’s imagination and set up a sentence.
  2.  Model section – the teacher close models a sentence that outlines clear writing features and techniques.
  3. Enable section – the children write their sentence, following the model.

"The Write Stuff" also reinforces grammar through the use of:
The FANTASTICs which are an acronym that summarise the ideas of writing;
The Grammar Rainbow which is a classroom tool that enables the teacher to drive key grammar messages;
The BOOMTASTIC which helps children capture 10 ways of adding drama and poetic devices to their writing.

Handwriting at Hope Community School

We follow letter-join scheme for our handwriting where we teach our pupils cursive handwriting from Year 1. In year R, pupils are taught the importance of posture and pencil groups through a range of gross and fine motor skill activities. They are also taught how to write the different letters when they learn the sounds in their phonic lesson. Please see the document below with the rhymes used to teach children the letter formation. 

Please see the progression documents below to see in more detail what your children are learning in English.