English

Scaffolds for Learning

Scaffolds for Learning are the methods of support that we give the children in school and at home. We use a variety of approaches to reinforce the knowledge and skills that we want our children to learn.  Below is a selection of the activities that we use for English.

Early Reading and Phonics
In Early Years and Key Stage 1 we teach synthetic phonics. We use the SoundsWrite programme in school and send home stage appropriate reading books  which support the teaching which has been done in school. These books are fully phonetically decodable.  
 After children can read fluently, they move on to a range of other books.
 
Class story, Cozy Chair and Cbeebies Bedtime Story
In Kestrel Class, the children listen to a wide variety of stories in 'real life' as well as pre-recorded high quality stories from The Cozy Chair and Cbeebies. The staff use carefully planned questions to help the children get the most out of each story. Many of our class stories are chosen from our 'Core Books List' which has a wide range of texts which we think it is important for the pupils at Bury to have experienced.
 
Book Trust
The Book Trust has a superb website which is full of activities for young readers as well as stories to listen to.
 
Listening to Children Read
We listen to Key Stage 1 and 2  children read regularly in school and expect that they will read daily at home too. When Early Years children are confident with segmenting and blending then they will start to take home phonetically decodable reading books. Please see below for some useful questions to ask your child while listening to them read or while sharing a book with them.
Spelling
We start to teach spelling through phonics in Early Years but this is then followed by learning spelling patterns and spelling using syllables in the rest of the school. Each child has a daily spelling lesson using our Sounds and Syllables resources.
 
Handwriting
Letter formation is taught from Early Years and continues to be taught and refined throughout the school. Our handwriting lessons are linked to the children's phonics lessons and they will learn to write and read the letter at the same time. As you would imagine, we teach handwriting with pencil and paper but also using a variety of multisensory approaches which help build muscle memory and  the fine motor control needed to use a pencil correctly. 
 
 
Writing
Children spend a lot of their school lives writing, not only in English lessons.  We want our children to be confident writers who can plan a piece of work and then use that plan to deliver a well thought out, relevant piece which they are proud of. 
 
Planning is one of the key components to good writing - without it the cognitive overload of writing can become too much and a child's writing will be of a much lower quality.
 
To help with planning their writing, the children use several different planning formats. The formats are different as each genre of writing will require different features to be included.Please see the links below to these documents and our rationale for using them.
 
 
Speaking and Listening
 
Speaking and listening are as important as the children's written work. In fact, as is often said, if a child can speak well, they will be able to write well.  We provide opportunities for oracy across school from freeflow activities in Early Years and working in mixed age pairs for project work to taking part in locality debates, running meetings with the community and acting as tour guides for open day. 
All children are given several opportunities a year to perform in either class productions, church services or leading assemblies based on our school values.