ENGLISH
Quality of Reading Education
Intent
At Belmont Primary School we recognise that reading is a child’s passport to the world: it is an essential and key skill for all learning. It develops the mind, language and communication skills: all of which are important to allow children to access the breadth of our rich curriculum. In line with recent National Curriculum expectations, at Belmont, we aim to inspire a lifelong enjoyment and love of reading, and reading for pleasure, which opens doors to all kinds of new worlds for the reader that cannot be covered by the school curriculum. We also encourage children to discuss and form opinions about what they have read.
With the right support every child can learn to read.
Implementation
At Belmont we place reading and books at the centre of our curriculum. Teachers are equipped with the skills and knowledge they need to teach all children to become accomplished readers. Books are carefully matched to the curriculum and units of lessons are organised around motivating, high quality texts. At every opportunity teachers should talk with enthusiasm about reading, sharing examples of good books. Children should also be given the opportunity to recommend books they have loved to their peers. The reading environment is designed to be welcoming such that our well-stocked libraries and book corners are places where children visit, choose and talk about books. By engaging with parents, we ensure the culture of reading developed by the school extends into the home. We also raise the profile of reading through celebrating World Book, National Poetry Day assemblies and author visits. Guided reading sessions provide the children with the opportunity to
Following a whole school strategy to further develop reading for pleasure time is built into the school day for children to read independently, read aloud and to be read to. The National curriculum for English at KS1 & KS2 places reading for pleasure at the heart of the English curriculum. Alongside an expectation that every school teaches children to read well, schools are expected to develop a love of reading in every child. Children at Belmont are inspired to read in many ways.
Pupil conferences will be held to give us an insight into children’s reading habits e.g. to find out what they read, how they choose books, how often they read, where they read and other opinions about reading.
Impact
We aim for children at Belmont to demonstrate a love of reading and books. All children should be aware of current class readers and be able to discuss them and give an opinion about them. We should also see a greater buzz around reading for pleasure, where the children are discussing and recommending books to each other in the same way they would do with movies, video games and TV shows! Although our reading results are already well above national average we would hope that they will increase further with a more targeted emphasis on a love of reading.
Quality of Writing Education
Intent
Writing: Writing is an essential life skill. At Belmont, we aim to motivate children to become fluent, passionate writers who can write for technical purpose and for pleasure. We aim to develop and apply writing skills across all the subjects in the curriculum. Successful writers are able to plan, revise and evaluate their own and others writing effectively across a range of genres. Last Spring we introduced new child friendly assessment grids to enable the children to meet these objectives and to further develop the visible learning approach that we follow.
Handwriting: this year we have introduced a whole school cursive style of handwriting from Reception to Year 6, to develop a consistent approach to the teaching of handwriting throughout the school. This should allow all children to write legibly, and at speed, as quickly as is possible.
Implementation
At Belmont writing is a key skill, which we develop through a rich curriculum in many subjects. High quality texts are used to plan effective writing units, which allow the children to analyse their structure and language. This enables the children to develop the writing skills associated with the various genres. Carefully planned lessons provide the children with a sense of purpose and motivation for their writing. Power of Reading resources are adapted to meet the needs of Belmont pupils and we also use elements of Talk for Writing to develop writing skills, especially in KS1.
Child friendly self-assessment writing grids have been developed to give the children greater ownership of their writing and to enable them to more accurately identify their next steps to make further progress. A discussion with a number of Y6 children in the summer term found that that a majority of the children found the grids very useful at identifying their strengths in writing and what their areas for improvement were.
Following the introduction of our new handwriting style we aim to showcase its use throughout the school e.g. in work samples, displays, corridors, classrooms and general labelling.
Impact
At Belmont, we aim to create children who are confident, fluent writers who can write for a wide range of purposes. Our child friendly self assessment grids will give the children greater confidence at working out where they are at and where they need to go next with their writing. This should in turn help Belmont raise our writing attainment levels even further.
Book looks should demonstrate a consistent use of the new handwriting style throughout the school, in time.
Policy
Please refer to our Policies and Procedures page.