We want our children to leave Allerton CE Primary with a love of words, the ability to manipulate them into different genres, a tool to express who they are and what they stand for and a means to communicate effectively. Therefore, hooking our children with purposeful writing opportunities is essential, as is modelling from the outset so that children build up the repertoire required for different genres. In order to do this, talk for writing is essential as is oral story telling. Through exposure to language rich texts, visual literacy, drama and real life experiences, our children will have the chance to imitate, innovate and finally create their independent writes in poetry, narrative and non-narrative. These will be built upon year by year so that by the time they leave us in Year 6 they are confident authors, journalists, commentators, poets and playwrights!

English Year Group Long Term Plan

How we Read at Allerton CE

At ACE we want all children to be a reader by the time they finish Key Stage 1. Reading enables children to access all areas of the curriculum and removes a lot of potential barriers to learning. A child who reads regularly will become a confident reader and writer.

The main way that we teach children to read is through synthetic phonics. There are lots of different schemes available to schools to use to teach their phonics and here at Allerton CE Primary School we have heavily invested in a programme called Read Write Inc. The reason we did this was because of a document called ‘Reading by six: how the best school do it.’ Over half of the schools featured in this Ofsted report used the Read Write Inc scheme to teach their phonics and reading. The great thing with RWI is that it also teaches the writing.

RWI teaches children how to read sounds and the letter that represents each of these sounds (phonemes and graphemes) and then teaches children how to blend these sounds together in order to read a word. These are known as ‘green’ words. Some words cannot be sounded out, these are known as ‘red’ words and  just have to be learnt by sight.

Children from our Early Years Foundation Stage to Year 2 are on the RWI phonics programme, with our aim being for the children to have finished the programme by the middle of year 2 and be ready to start the RWI comprehension programme. Children in Nursery are also introduced to some of the simple sounds and do oral blending activities or Fred talk.

Children are assessed according to their reading ability every half term and grouped so they can be taught in groups that are all learning at the same level. RWI takes place on a Monday to Wednesday from 9.15am till 10.15am. This is why it is important that they are in school and on time every day. A new sound will be taught every day and then different reading activities, building confidence with a text over time and increasing fluency and expression. Children also develop the ability to answer comprehension questions from a text and work in pairs so they are all joining in. Children thoroughly enjoy the RWI sessions.