Reading at the Heart of Our Curriculum
Teaching of Early Reading at Feniton School is influenced by guidance in the DfE Reading Framework 2021:
Decodable Texts:
- Decodable books and other texts make children feel successful from the very beginning because the words in the book are chosen to link to only the phonic sounds they have learned.
- Decodable books and texts that children read should run alongside or a little behind the teaching of phonics in the classroom, so that they always feel a sense of achievement when they are asked to read such books.
Developing Fluency:
- Fluent decoding allows us to understand what we read. Because the reader has gained accuracy and automaticity in word reading, the brain’s resources are available to focus on lifting the meaning from the page.
- As children gain fluency, their motivation increases: they start to enjoy reading more and are willing to do more of it.
- Accuracy as well as speed influences fluency; it is not just about the speed at which a child reads.
- Equally, accuracy on its own is not useful, unless they can read at a sufficient rate to support comprehension. Both accuracy and speed are essential.
- However, practising to gain automaticity in decoding needs to focus on accuracy: children can read only at the speed they can decode.
Retrieval Practice
We include a retreival practice activity in each of our lessons to make learning stick!
Recognising a relationship between concepts will activate other knowledge and form a spider web. It is easier to learn new knowledge if we already have links between our prior knowledge.
- Retrieval Practice strengthens our existing connections and helps us re-organise our knowledge which we can then use in a faster and more efficient way.
- We need facts in our head which are interconnected. Isolated facts with no context clues or links to existing knowledge have nothing to ‘stick to’ and therefore do not last.
Talking about learning is essential in all aspects of our curriculum delivery.
School Curriculum Planners: we regularly review and update our curriculum to ensure it is relevant and exciting. We want children to be able to continually build on their knowledge and skills as they move up through the year groups.
Year Group Curriculum Summaries
These documents provide a summary of age-related expectations at the end of each year group. By the end of the year, we expect the majority of children to be able to achieve the following. Some children with additional needs will have a personalised, Individual Education Plan to help them achieve their potential in relation to these expectations.
Subject Progression
By the time children reach the end of Year 6, we want them to have accumulated a wealth of knowledge and skills, across all subject areas, that they can apply to future learning.
These planners ensure learning progresses, enabling children to build on what they know, using their knowledge and skills to solve increasingly more complex problems and to apply to more demanding tasks as they move up through the school.
Progression in Maths
These progression documents are used by the teachers and the children to track progress across a year group. Each document show end of year expectations, building on the year before. These objectives will be taught within maths lessons and applied in other subjects.
Writing Progression
These progression documents are used by the teachers and the children to track progress across a year group. Each document show end of year expectations in writing, building on the year before. These objectives will be taught within English lessons and applied in writing tasks in other subjects.