English

 

At St. Bonaventure’s, we believe that English underpins our children’s development and in turn their access to all aspects of our curriculum.  We aim to deliver high quality teaching of reading, writing and oracy (speaking & listening) in order to enable all our children to become independent and successful readers and writers, who can communicate meaningfully and effectively with others.  We want our children to have the best experiences of English at St. Bonaventure’s, one which will endeavour to develop, support and enhance their learning journey throughout their school life and beyond.  Above all, at St. Bonaventure’s we want our children to experience a rich and creative English learning journey, one which will provide a thirst and excitement for both reading and writing. 

 

 

 

Alongside the National Curriculum, we use ‘The Power of Reading’ to enhance children’s pleasure in reading and writing by using high-quality children’s literature creatively in the classroom. We strongly emphasise the link between reading and writing and encourage our children to ‘read like a writer and write like a reader.’ English at St. Bonaventure’s is given at least five hours of teaching time each week.  This includes reading, writing, grammar, spelling/ phonics, handwriting and oracy (speaking & listening). 

 

Reading is at the heart of learning at St Bonaventure’s and we aim to inspire children’s learning through the use of high-quality texts across the curriculum.  We encourage all children to read widely across both fiction and non-fiction texts, to establish an appreciation and love of reading, to gain knowledge across the curriculum and wider knowledge of themselves and the world they live in. We aspire for our children to develop a passion for reading and use their reading skills to support and enhance their writing development. Throughout the school week, children are immersed in high quality texts which endeavor to support our children in becoming fluent, competent and confident readers.

Children begin their reading journey in Reception by following a systematic, synthetic phonics programme which teaches them the initial sounds (and corresponding graphemes) they need to know to be able to begin reading. This programme continues throughout Reception and in to year 1 with the emphasis lying on developing the skills of segmenting and blending in order to become fluent readers. As children progress in to year 2 and beyond, reading becomes more focused on comprehension skills and children being able to understand what they have read. We follow the acronym ‘VIPERS’ which helps the children remember the key reading skills: vocabulary, inference, predication, explanation, retrieval and sequencing/ summarising.

We believe that to foster a love and passion for reading, the relationship that children have with books and reading at school must also continue outside of school.  Ideally, the books that the children receive from school are the minimum amount they should be reading.  We actively encourage trips to the library with parents, so that children can choose their own books. We also have a wonderful selection of books in our school library, which children can self-select and bring home to share.  Parents are given information about how much reading should be done at home for each year group during the Parent Information Evenings at the beginning of the academic year.

 

 

Reading Impact

 

Through our shared love of reading at St Bonaventure’s and our promotion of high-quality texts, our aspiration for all children is that they will:

• enjoy reading a wide variety of texts

• have an extensive vocabulary that they use within their speaking and writing

• make measurable progress from their individual starting point in reading

• be able to confidently talk about books they’ve read and why they have enjoyed them

• have a love and passion for reading!