English/Literacy

English

The English curriculum at Kilnwood Vale enables children to develop as strong readers and writers, which is underpinned through developing high-functioning oracy. Their English journey gives them the skills, confidence and knowledge not only to access the curriculum but prepare them to be global citizens of the future.

Reading

Children develop a life-long love of reading and will read for pleasure both in school and at home. They enjoy listening to high-quality stories and will join in with enthusiasm. They will also be exposed to a wide range of genres and develop a breadth of vocabulary through reading different styles of books. KVPS provides opportunities to read literary heritage books as well as  books that mirror their own lives and those that provide a window into other people’s worlds, ensuring their reading journey celebrates their own identity and the diversity of our community and the wider world. Children will have a secure knowledge of phonics and apply this confidently to their reading to enable them to be confident and fluent readers. They will have a secure understanding of what they are reading, make inferences and talk in detail about a range of texts. From these foundations the DERIC (Decode, Explain, Retrieve, Infer and Choice) model informs whole school quality-first teaching to ensure children leave Kilnwood Vale ready motivated and with the knowledge and skills to continue their reading journey.

• In all year groups: Children are exposed to a collection of high-quality texts via Pie Corbett spine books, read aloud to children daily. 
• In EYFS and Year 1: Children engage in a daily session of 'Talk Through Stories', which exposes children to a well-planned, well-sequenced whole class story that unpicks vocabulary, word meaning in context and favourite phrases. During the session, they will also be exposed to sophisticated reading skills such as predicting, summarising and making inferences. 
• From Year 2: Children engage in a daily session of 'Whole Class Reading'. During these lessons, all children will have a copy of the text - either the class book or the extract - and will be exposed to a range of reading techniques to enhance fluency and explicitly teach prosody. This links to our core curriculum driver of Oracy. 

Phonics

We use Read, Write, Inc. as our phonics scheme at Kilnwood Vale. The scheme has been carefully planned to ensure phonics lessons are of high quality, engaging and repetitive to embed learning. The progression of phonics ensures that all children learn to read, gain a love of reading and extend their vocabulary. Children read decodable books which match to the teaching and  learning. This ensures that children will read books which include sounds and words they have been taught, enabling them to make progress.

Writing

Children will develop a love for writing. At Kilnwood Vale we use RWI Get Writing! and elements of Pie Corbett's 'Talk for Writing' as tools to provide small steps of learning so that children can become enthusiastic and confident writers.

Reception and KS1 follow the Get Writing! RWI scheme, which contains a wide range of writing activities closely linked to the RWI Storybooks and Non-Fiction books. Children's writing is supported at every step from writing simple sentences to extended texts including invitations, letters, descriptive texts and non-fiction texts. Longer composition activities include oral rehearsal and role play so children can develop ideas before they write. Grammar, spelling, and vocabulary activities, which are drawn from the Storybooks texts and matched to the National Curriculum, are integrated to help children reach the higher standards. Check boxes throughout the books prompt children to proofread and review their writing helping them to make sustained progress.

From Year 3, pupils are taught writing using elements of 'Talk for Writing' (T4W). Each unit of work starts with a 'cold' task to see what the children can do independently so the subsequent unit planning is informed by assessment as well as the National Curriculum objectives for the year group. At the end of the unit, pupils complete a 'hot' task, which is an independent task based on the same text type, this shows us the progress each child has made within each unit of writing. A model text is used which is pitched above the children's level and has built into it underlying, transferable structures and language patterns that children will need when writing.

Nursery children will use elements of T4W as part of their literacy curriculum, supporting oracy and pre-writing skills that are fundamental for children to develop before they can write.

Additionally, once a half term, all children will participate in a Creative Writing Week where they will be hooked in with a stimulus before being immersed in a theme in order to produce and showcase high quality, creative writing.