English vision at Barming Primary School:

Our teachers at Barming Primary School work hard to ensure that our children experience an engaging, enjoyable and stimulating English curriculum.  Throughout their time at Barming, we nurture our children to develop a love of reading and ultimately become life-long readers.  From an early age, we want our children to become confident and proficient writers and develop a love for communicating with others.

Reading:

Reading is the door to creativity, to visualisation and to greater knowledge; it is the gateway to fantastic, impossible realms, planets and worlds. Research tells us that children who read for pleasure on a daily basis develop a wider vocabulary, greater general knowledge and a far better understanding of other cultures. It is perhaps one of the single most important factors in a child’s development. Naturally, we therefore believe that it is every child’s right to learn to read, but we hope that our children go far beyond this to develop a true love and pleasure for reading.

Reading is at the heart of fostering a love of literature and is integral to all aspects of our curriculum.  High quality texts are shared with the children from EYFS to Year 6 and include both classic literature as well as contemporary author’s work.  Our approach of whole class reading lessons enables children to articulate their thoughts and opinions in class discussion.  Discrete vocabulary teaching lessons and targeted teaching of specific reading skills precede opportunities for children to practise and master the application of these reading skills.  Children experience a rich diet of well-known author’s work, explore language changes over time by reading classic texts and are provided with a rich, diverse contextual understanding of current global affairs. 

Phonics is taught in Year R and Key Stage 1 using ‘Letters and Sounds’ Our young readers in EYFS and Key Stage 1 develop their reading skills using a book banded reading scheme which offers a wide variety of genres to develop reading skills. Books shared are from Oxford Reading Tree, Collins Big Cat and PM , building on the children’s phonics knowledge and fluent reading of high frequency words.  Children continue to follow the book banded scheme into the start of Key Stage 2 and are encouraged to develop as independent readers, discovering favourite authors amongst the well-stocked shelves in the school library as well as using the class libraries and phase group reading nooks.

Writing:

In addition to our teaching of reading using high quality texts, our children also receive stimuli for their writing from a wide range of whole texts, extracts, animated short clips or music videos in addition to a range of fiction, non-fiction and poetry genres. We focus on spelling, punctuation and grammar as your child progresses through the school building and developing their understanding of different grammar terms and syntax.

We are proud to use to use the W.R.I.T.E.R sequence to deepen children’s understanding of different features for different styles of writing.