English (literacy)
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Article 17
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Our Vision:
To engender a life-long love of language and communication by learning about literacy skills through the use of quality children’s text and books that interest, inspire and excite readers and to link our learning to cross curricular topics allowing a depth of understanding of genre and subject knowledge.
At Cooper Perry:
Literacy/English forms a very important part of the curriculum at our school. Children are taught spoken language, word transcription, reading comprehension, writing, vocabulary, grammar and punctuation, handwriting and composition. Editing and drafting are essential: the children learn and independence essential for the next stage in their education; at the same time producing work of their highest possible capabilities.
Children have opportunities throughout the week to develop phonics and/or spelling at their age related expectations, plus time for some to develop gaps they have in their knowledge and learning. Grammar is taught in a variety of ways: standalone sessions and as part of the writing and composition sessions where these skills form next steps, in line with end of year expectations. Workshops are held to support all children who need to recap, pre learn or extend their skills. Children are given daily opportunities to practise their written work across the curriculum. It’s essential literacy is not seen as something to use during English sessions, hence literacy targets and objectives are also apparent across all learning opportunities.
As you travel throughout our school you will encounter cross curricular writing displayed with pride. Our reading scheme is based on Book Bands and Oxford Reading Tree and it is supplemented with 'real' books. We encourage all children to read a variety of reading materials and Key Stage 2 children may bring in home reading books as part of their daily reading.
Did you know there was a new curriculum for 2014? Why not have a look at the overview of what the expectations are for this year?
Useful information:
Phonics and Spelling at Cooper Perry:
Phonics teaches children the basics of letters and sounds. It teaches them the names and the sounds that letters make and how these letters can be blended together to make new sounds. For example: sh an th.
Children receive word lists appropriate to ARE and are taught spelling patterns as part of their weekly learning, Spellings and patterns are tested each Friday.
Making Spelling Memorable, is a series a fun ways to embed our spellings. If you can't find the link on our web page , please speak to your class teacher.
Reading:
At Cooper Perry we read widely and in a variety of places; we even held a competition to prove this.
We read all of the time for understanding, to make sense of all of our lessons and of course for enjoyment.
In EYS we share books with children in our own classes and throughout the school; plus we read daily using schemes such as Oxford Reading Tree and Synthetic Phonics reading books. We continue with these books as we travel through KS1 and into KS2, with more books added to our repertoire following book band guidance until we are ready in KS2 to make choices from book boxes also banded (we also share books from home too). Then when we are growing even more confident and happy with our reading we can bring in our own books and share these titles with our friends to broaden our enjoyment and reading experiences. Each day KS2 spend time absorbed in their own books and we ask children to make recomendations to pupils and staff.
Y6 run library sessions each lunchtime for all of KS1 and KS2. We have recently added more books to class library shelves and our school library.
Wise Owls:
Year 6 have risen to a variety of reading challenges; come and visit our very own Parliament of Owls, and ask about the challenges set.
Writing:
We write lots at Cooper Perry and our staff ensure there is coverage of a wide range of genre: letters, stories, news reports, recounts, plays, poems, non chronological reports and instructions are just some ways we make the writing experience enjoyable.
We spend time assessing our own work and that of our partners. We annotate ways to improve our work and make note of the targets we've achieved, and of course our next steps. We often highlight or number specific objectives to show where we are in the learning process based on Age Related Expectations.
Examples of year 6 writing:
Editing and drafting:
We are hard workers and realise the importance of drafting and editing our work; you'll notice the use of pink polishing pens to show how we've done this. You may also notice green pen corrections: this shows how we've been asked to embed part of our learning which our teachers think we are more than capable of showing.