Reading
At Elm Park we use a variety of reading schemes to support the children’s reading development, mainly consisting of books purchased from the Oxford Reading Tree. The books are banded according to difficulty and de-codable words; this is done by colour or stage. The children’s reading ability is matched to the book level and they are moved through the stages as their decoding, word recognition, fluency and comprehension progresses. Initially, in the Foundation stage, children have picture books without words and story books sent home for shared reading with an adult. The final stage is Lime level (Stage 11), and the children then become free readers, accessing a range of books on the class book shelves.
Phonics is taught throughout Reception and Key Stage 1, and used to support children in Key Stage 2, where appropriate. The school follows Letters and Sounds, as published by the government and uses the synthetic phonics programme, Floppy’s Phonics, to support teaching and learning. This progress to Read Write Inc spelling as the children move to the end of Year 2 and throughout Key Stage 2.
The Book Trust’s Best Books Reading Guide can be found here
The details from the Phonics Information Parents Workshop Afternoon held can be found here:
Phonics Powerpoint Information
More information on helping your child to read can be found here:
Reading with your Child at Home – leaflet
We would like to hear your views, please find our feedback form here:
Reading and Writing Feedback Form
Books your children may like to read can be found here:
Exception Words can be found here:
Year 1 Year 2 Year 3 Year 4 Year 5 Year 6
Writing
Writing at Elm Park is taught on a 2 year cycle, due to the mixed classes. Children enjoy accessing high quality writing experiences rich in purpose so that they can develop key skills to help them to:
• Explore and read a range of texts linked to the genre.
• Develop their speaking and listening skills, including drama, role play and presentational techniques.
• Develop an understanding of the features of the text type, generally by regularly accessing a range of text from the genre.
• Look at high quality texts and use these to influence and develop their own writing.
• Experience high quality teacher modelled writing.
• Plan and complete extended pieces of writing.
• Edit and improve written pieces.
Children will also develop key word and sentence level skills through the genre that they are learning about. Key skills that have been identified as gaps or areas for development will also be addressed during literacy lessons, often in guided writing sessions. Guided writing is used to directly target areas that children need to progress. They are small group sessions run by the teacher or TA. This helps to ensure progress is made by all children.
Opportunities for regular short burst writing are encouraged throughout a unit of work, enabling the children to expereince writing opportunities as regularly as possible. The value of reading and high quality speaking and listening, such as Talk for Writing strategies, also make up a proportion of literacy teaching and are valuable in moving writing forward.
Spelling
There are lots of ways to practise spellings with your children at home. There are some suggested ideas in the document below.
Contact us for additional information