In all year groups, we teach writing through high-quality texts.
Over their time at the school, children will write a variety of fiction and non-fiction texts, including recounts, news reports, explanation texts, poems, plays and stories of all kinds. We use drama, role-play, storytelling and discussion to engage the imagination, before moving on to vocabulary exploration, sentence craft and creative writing.
From Year 1 upwards we have developed our own writing structure which allows children to analyse high-quality texts and break down the texts into sections and then replicate in their own work. Children have regular opportunities to write sections of work based on modelling from the teacher and then have the opportunity to edit and improve these sections before publishing their writing in a completed text.
Throughout the Early Years and Key Stage 1 children are taught the key principles of writing in order to lay a solid foundation for developing their skills later on. An emphasis is placed on developing clear handwriting with ‘finger spaces’ between each word. Children are taught to apply their knowledge of phonics to help them spell accurately, and to structure their work, whether it be fiction writing or a set of instructions. Our curriculum teaches the children to add variation and description to their work by developing their vocabulary, including the use of interesting adjectives and adverbs and developing sentence structure using conjunctions and sentence openers.
By the end of Key Stage 1 children have been taught the fundamentals of punctuation and grammar. This structural and technical knowledge is fostered alongside developing a love for writing as a lifelong means for communication and expressing oneself.
First and foremost, we want all children at Little Ealing to develop a life-long love of reading. As a result, we approach the teaching of reading from all angles, so as to miss no opportunity to spark a child’s interest.
We have daily Guided Reading lessons that focus on the skills of fluency and comprehension. we have developed our own schedule of guided reading that can be found below.
Teachers read a huge variety of written material regularly with the children, fiction and non-fiction, stories, reports, diaries and poems. Each year group has access to a ‘Class Book Library’ containing challenging and interesting novels for teachers to read to their classes, exposing children to language and classic stories which they may find too challenging to read independently.
We have a home-school reading system (up to Year 6), which requests that children read a book at the appropriate level for them, for at least ten minutes each day. In Reception and Key Stage 1, children use books that are linked to the phonics set they are learning via 'Read, Write Inc' and they will also have the opportunity to take other Book Banded Reading Scheme books that are appropriate to their level after they have been benchmarked.
Moving up into Key Stage 2, children follow ‘book bandings’ as well as age-appropriate 'free readers', ensuring they are making progress.