English
Reading
Reading is at the heart of each classroom in our school. Teachers enjoy taking the time to share high quality texts with depth and interest in story, character, illustration, vocabulary, subject and subject matter with their class and model reading for pleasure. This promotes a reading culture whereby children enjoy reading themselves and in turn develop fluency, stamina and confidence when reading aloud. We also actively encourage talk about books: sharing our thoughts, opinions, questions and predictions. This further develops our children’s comprehension skills and also opens their minds to the wider world and life beyond our local community. Each classroom has a broad and current variety of books that provide texts for every reader from graphic novels, non-gender stereotyped, poetry, picture books and classic novels. We avidly foster engagement through drama and role-play to help our readers to understand and access texts and become characters. Our readers are beginning to work with authors to understand the process of creating a book and use literature beyond the literacy lessons with cross-curricular and quality literature at the start point. By the time our children leave us at the end of KS2, they will have been exposed to a wide variety of texts and authors. They will view reading not only as an essential life skill, but also something that provides great enjoyment and escapism.
Writing
Writing is a crucial part of school life at St Peter and St Paul primary. We want our children to develop a love of writing and to view it as an opportunity to express themselves and use their imagination.
Our aim is to provide our children with a rich vocabulary, a secure understanding of grammar, punctuation and spelling which they will confidently apply to their writing across the curriculum. We want our children to enjoy the writing process and to feel confident to take risks and be creative. They will work towards independently identifying areas for improvement in order to ensure their writing is clear, accurate and coherent through proof-reading and editing across a range of genres. We set high expectations for our children: we want them to take pride in their work and want to share their writing achievements.
By the time our children leave us in Year 6, they will be confident writers and effective communicators. They will have the skills needed to participate fully as a member of society.
Speaking & Listening
In order for children to be confident readers and expressive writers they also need to be articulate speakers. The modelling of clear speech and expression is therefore pivotal in the development of the children’s literacy skills.
At St Peter & St Paul we take time to encourage the children to expressive themselves clearly, to orally rehearse what they want to say before they commit their ideas to paper and to listen carefully when other people are speaking.
Hearing texts being read aloud is very important at St Peter & St Paul. We expect time in the school day to be given to this, so children can hear the impact of words and how they affect the listener as well as the reader. Both adults and children are encouraged to read aloud on a daily basis and we feel this has a significant impact on both reading and writing.
Drama, role play and assemblies are just some of the other mechanisms that are used to develop confident, mature and expressive pupils in our school.
Year 6 Podcast
Year 6 practised reading aloud confidently and clearly for an audience as part of their non-fiction writing on Climate Change. They have recorded extracts of three pieces of writing (non-chronological reports, persuasive speeches and poetry) which we have edited into podcast format! Please click the private link below to have a listen...