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.