Here at Collingbourne, we believe a high quality education in English is vital to enable children to communicate effectively. Reading is a key skill, and is crucial to all areas of cultural, emotional, intellectual, social and spiritual development.

A point worth remembering is “learn to read, read to learn!”

Our aim is to promote high standards of language and literacy by:

• Equipping children with a strong command of the spoken word
• Encouraging children to listen with care and attention
• Ensuring children write with clarity, awareness of audience, purpose and context and an increasingly wide knowledge of vocabulary, spelling and grammar
• Developing children’s competence in phonics, word recognition and comprehension

Reading is taught through Little Wandle, a systematic synthetic phonics scheme, at first before children move on to a graded scheme of books to develop a wide reading vocabulary and a good comprehension of the texts they read.

We have a scheme of books for children to practice at home and a different scheme of books used in group Guided Reading sessions during the school day. In these groups the children are encouraged to read fluently with expression, ask and answer questions about their books and to look for meanings beyond the written word. The practice children do at home is central to these skills becoming second nature leading to confident and fluent readers.

Writing is taught in a variety of ways to promote creativity, relevance and enthusiasm. The topics will often be linked to our Creative Curriculum to help children see how writing for a purpose can be really important. The skills are taken from the National Curriculum and spread over the year to allow children to build on each step of their learning and consolidate and apply their knowledge.

Handwriting is important at Collingbourne. We encourage children to take pride in their work and to strive to always present their work neatly. We teach printed letter formations first in Reception and Year One. When the children are secure in the correct letter formation for the entire alphabet, they will be taught to join their letters using a fully cursive script, usually at some stage in Year Two. Handwriting continues to be practiced throughout Key Stage 2 and children who have developed a confident, legible and personal style will be awarded a Pen Licence and write thereafter with a fibre tip handwriting pen or cartridge ink pen.

The following documents give more details of the progression in Reading and Writing, the script we use for handwriting, and the wide range of books we use in our school reading scheme.