English

Writing

At Roe Lee Park Primary School, we deliver daily English lessons through Read, Write Inc in Foundation Stage , with the children moving onto Talk4Writing once they are into Year 1, which will then continue for the duration of Key Stage 1 & 2. Talk4Writing is an approach developed by Pie Corbett. Talk for Writing enables children to orally imitate the key language they need for a particular text type before they try to write it. Through fun activities that help them rehearse the tune of the language they need, followed by shared writing to show them how to craft their writing, children are helped to write in the same style. We have found that, having adopted this approach, we have not only increased our children’s progress in writing but have found that children and teachers alike love it!

Reading

The children are taught reading comprehension and decoding skills through daily whole class Guided Reading sessions. Due to many of our children speaking English as an additional language, along with the rising expectations of national expectations, we place a great emphasis on learning and developing new vocabulary before the children meet the week's text. We pre-teach this vocabulary through a variety of engaging games and activities, which then enable the children to confidently decode and comprehend the text upon that first read.

Handwriting

Handwriting is practiced daily at Roe Lee, with the class teacher modelling the Penpal's Handwriting scheme.

Spelling

Recent research has shown that sending a list of words home each week does not mean that these words are actually committed to the long term memory of a child. We have found in school that, after a few weeks, children often can no longer apply these spellings to their independent writing.

At Roe Lee Park, we believe the main focus should be on the teaching of spelling, which embraces knowledge of spelling conventions – patterns and rules; but also integral to the teaching is the opportunity to promote the learning of spellings, including statutory words, common exceptions and personal spellings. Teaching and reinforcing spelling within the classroom learning is proving to be a much more efficient and effective way of embedding the spellings for the long term.