English

Reading Aims

At St Michael’s CE Academy, we aim to:

Develop and nurture the vocabulary and language skills of our children who begin their time here from very low starting points.
Immerse the children with high quality texts read with enthusiasm and expression to inspire creativity and enrich their growing vocabulary.
Encourage the enjoyment of books and reading for a purpose and pleasure, within a rich and stimulating reading environment, so that children develop a life-long love of books and a thirst for knowledge.
Encourage care, appreciation and ownership of books.
Provide the children with the reading skills and strategies necessary to develop them into enthusiastic, competent, accurate, fluent and independent readers, able to use a variety of skills to enhance their learning.
Develop an understanding of what they have read by eliciting their responses through the use of ‘key questioning’. Have a passion for new words and their meanings, developing a growing vocabulary in spoken and written forms
Develop higher order reading skills, enabling the use of inference and deduction.
To understand, empathise and respond to the emotions and feelings that words can arouse within us
Develop a critical appreciation of the work of authors, poets and illustrators from modern fiction, fiction and our literary heritage in order to emulate these skills in their own writing
Improve their abilities to read, analyse and evaluate a wide range of texts, including literature from other cultures and traditions.
Develop study skills so that the children can find appropriate fiction and non-fiction books from the library and research skills, using library and class texts, in conjunction with ICT
To maintain partnerships with parents as an important part of our reading program.

Writing Aims

At St. Michael’s CE Academy we aim to:

Encourage accurate and meaningful writing with an emphasis on audience and purpose
Equip children with a wide vocabulary, have an understanding of grammar and a knowledge of linguistic conventions for their writing
Provide a rich and stimulating language environment where pupils work collaboratively and where speaking and listening, reading and writing are interrelated.
Develop suitable language structures and technical vocabulary to articulate their responses both orally and in writing
Provide the children with opportunities for writing across all areas of the curriculum, make it relevant and meaningful and allow opportunities for application of skills
Ensure that teaching and learning of writing is consistent across the school, to aid children’s progress
Encourage the children to present their writing to a high standard, at each of the stages of the writing process: planning, drafting, editing and re-drafting
Develop the children’s understanding of the sound and spelling system to enable them to use it to write confidently and accurately
Ensure the children develop fluent and legible handwriting
Equip the children with ICT skills to communicate in written form
Involve the children in target setting, so that they understand how to make progress in their writing
Create a genuine love of writing and an appreciation of its value, so that the children choose to write and are able to organise and structure a variety of texts, whilst developing their imagination and critical awareness
Provide children with as many ‘real’ reasons to write as possible. This purpose improves the quality of children’s work. Opportunities may include trips, enrichment activities, books and reading or visitors.
Make creative connections where possible between the topic the class are working on and writing activities. Specific skills can be transferred from literacy teaching to other areas.
Assist the children in becoming independent writers
To provide a rich and stimulating writing environment both within the class and around the whole school
Maintain partnerships with parents as an important part of the language programme.

Please see our Whole English Policy for further information.