English at Wyvern
Reading
Reading at Wyvern encourages all children to develop a love of reading.
We aim for reading to expand their horizons, build their creativity and unlock their imaginations. In their time at Wyvern, our children become confident, active readers and equip themselves with a skill for life. We promote a love of reading through library visits, book fairs and celebrating World Book Day.
At the beginning of their reading journey, children are taught phonics following the ASL model. This teaches them, through discrete phonics sessions as well as shared and guided reading, to decode words and blend sounds together leading into reading full sentences.
Alongside phonics, the children learn to develop their comprehension through the learning of key reading skills. The children will take part in shared reading as a whole class and also in guided reading where they work with the class teacher as part of a small group. We encourage them to read independently as much as possible.
The children are encouraged to read and share books at home. These books will be banded based on the child’s ability level and in Key Stage 1 they will be phonically decodable, linked to the phonics that they have already covered. Children will be heard reading regularly in school and an adult will check both their decoding and their understanding.
We encourage home reading as much as possible, please support your child by listening to them read. You could ask them questions to check that they have understood what they have read.
Examples of some questions that you could use:
- What can you tell me about the main character?
- What has been the best bit about the book so far?
- What do you think will happen next? Why?
- Who in your class would like this book and why?
- Is this book like any other books that you have read?
- What can you picture in your head when you are reading this part?
- How is the character feeling and how do you know?
- How would you feel if you were the main character?
Writing
In Key Stage 2, the children will work on writing from a range of different types of text. This will include fiction, non-fiction and poetry. Over the year, we try to build up the children’s writing skills by introducing new skills, practising them in a shorter piece of writing and then using them alongside other skills in longer pieces of writing. Writing is often linked to another book that we may be looking at in class as this helps the children to get lots of ideas in their own work as well as teaching them to appreciate a wider range of books and authors.
After writing, the children will always edit and improve their work. This means that they will check that the grammar and punctuation are correct but they will also try to improve their sentences to make them even better. This might involve focussing on aspects like the adjectives that they choose or extending their sentences to include some extra ideas. Please try to support your child with this in their home learning and make sure that all of their writing is the best that it can be.
Handwriting
At Wyvern, our children are proud of their work and we encourage neat presentation in all subjects. As part of this, we focus on neat, joined handwriting.
The children start their handwriting journey in KS1 with learning to form their letters so that they are all the same size and are neatly on the line.
During Year 1, the children will learn to write in pre cursive letters which means that the letters are not joined but they are ready to be joined later in school. By the time the children are in Year 2, we expect them to be using the pre cursive letters consistently and some children may be starting to join.
During KS2 (Years 3-6) the children will start to join their letters consistently in all of their work. The children might start to develop their own style of fluent, joined handwriting and they will continue to practise this throughout Key Stage 2. It is important that the children use their neatest writing whenever they are working, including in their home learning.
During Year 5 the children will start to use a pen.
Spellings
Every week, the children will be set spellings to learn that week. Please try to practise these spellings with your children as much as possible at home. The weekly spellings will often focus on certain spelling patterns or rules. We also encourage the children to learn the common exception words from their year group as these are the words that they often find trickiest to spell.
The class teachers may suggest different and creative ways for the children to practise their spellings as this can often help them to learn them. Please continue to work on previous week’s spellings with your child so that they do not forget the spellings that they have already been tested on.
