At Tudor Grange Primary Academy Hockley Heath, we aim to ignite a love for English language and literature in order that children become confident communicators and talented readers and writers. We strive to achieve this through the study of high-quality, diverse texts as well as ensuring vocabulary is explored and explicitly taught as this is key to academic success.

Phonics and Reading

At TGPAHH, we believe that all our children can become fluent readers and writers. This is why we teach reading through Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised, which is a systematic and synthetic phonics programme.

Phonics teaching begins in Nursery/Reception following the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised progression, which ensures children build on their growing knowledge of the alphabetic code, mastering phonics to read and spell as they move through school. Once children get to Reception, they bring home books that match their phonics learning and understanding.

Support for Parents can be found here: Little Wandle Letters and Sounds- For Parents

Reading is taught through whole class, group and individual reading sessions. Pupils are given opportunities to visit the school and class libraries, be read to our loud (REAL reading) and read for pleasure. Language and text comprehension skills are strengthened through high quality text and questioning.  

Book Recommendations

For ideas regarding how to support your child at home with their reading please click on these links:

Parent Reading Leaflet Questions.pdf

Parent Reading Leaflet Questions.pdf

Grammar, Punctuation, Spelling and Handwriting

Grammar and punctuation are embedded throughout our English curriculum. Once children are secure in the use of Systematic Synthetic Phonics (the link between sounds and letters), spelling is taught by learning spelling rules. Fluent, joined handwriting is given a high priority.

Writing

Intent

At Tudor Grange Primary Academy Hockley heath, we are passionate about ensuring every child can write, and sees themselves as a writer. We strive to ensure that high-quality education in English will teach pupils to speak and write fluently, so that they can communicate their ideas and emotions to others, and through their reading and listening, others can communicate with them. Our aim is to promote high standards of language and literacy by equipping pupils with a strong command of the spoken and written word. We want every child to acquire a wide vocabulary, an understanding of grammar, and knowledge of linguistic conventions for reading, writing, and spoken language, in a creative, diverse, and purposeful way. We want all pupils to be able to write clearly, accurately, and coherently, adapting their language and style in and for a range of contexts, purposes, and audiences. We support students to progressively improve their transcription and composition skills, and from this to plan, revise, and evaluate their writing.

Implementation

To enable our children to write effectively, and with clarity, we teach writing using “The Write Stuff,” by Jane Considine. We understand that this is a schema, and not a scheme: an effective way to make the complex cognitive load required to write well simple, sticky, and explicit. This approach is being implemented from nursery to Y6 from September 2023, to allow children to build the substantive and disciplinary knowledge required over time to write effective sentences, with the grammar and vocabulary required explicitly modelled, to lead to confident independent writing. Over time, children will write a broad range of fiction and non-fiction texts, from a variety of themes and inspirations.

‘The Write Stuff’ brings clarity to the mechanics of teaching writing. It is introduced through the ‘Writing Rainbow’, using three zones of writing. These three essential components consist of: the FANTASTICS (ideas); the GRAMMARISTICS (tools); the BOOMTASTICS (techniques).

From ‘The Writing Rainbow’, symbols are used to support children with their writing journey and to ensure that all children can use them in context as they move through school.

In addition to ‘The Writing Rainbow’, ‘The Writing Laundry’ is a tool used to support children with editing their writing. The idea behind the laundry is that children do not forget the key components of building a sentence.

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