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The Cobbs Infant and Nursery School

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ENGLISH

The Cobbs Infant and Nursery School believes that developing strong English skills is essential for progressing across the curriculum and preparing for adult life. All teachers have a responsibility to develop pupils’ competence in reading, writing, speaking and listening and to ensure that pupils build the language skills necessary to fully access the curriculum.

Reading

At our school, reading is seen as a life skill and the key to academic success. We want every child to gain a life-long love of reading, apply their knowledge of structured synthetic phonics in order to decode unfamiliar words, read with confidence, accuracy, fluency and expression, to comprehend and respond to a wide range of texts.

Through the delivery of our reading curriculum we ensure consistent, progressive and robust teaching and learning of early reading and phonics. Synthetic phonics is the first method for the teaching of reading as it provides the foundations required to become a fluent reader. We understand that once children are able to decode fluently, the teaching of comprehension is quicker and more effective as they are able to focus all of their attention to understanding what they read.

Reading books in Reception and Year 1 match our phonics programme. Children are taught specific phonemes/graphemes and then have access to the equivalent books that reinforce the phonics that have been explicitly taught. Pupils have opportunities to develop their reading skills daily, and are encouraged to read at home with an adult.

We provide a text rich environment, in order to encourage a positive culture of reading throughout all classes and promote pupils’ enjoyment of reading. Children hear, share and discuss a range of high-quality texts through our whole class English teaching, both in terms of fiction and non‐fiction. Each class has an inspiring reading corner and weekly access to the school library. Children are encouraged to share their favourite stories with their class and assemblies are held to inspire a love of reading.

Reading in our school

Nursery - Looking at books in the reading den
Nursery - 'Story Telling' Chair
Reception - Library time
Reception - 'Story Telling' Chair
Reception - Receiving a rosette for learning tricky words
Reception - Reading Bug Club phonics books online
Year 1 - Enjoying books in the reading corner
Year 2 - Choosing a book in the Library

What English looks like in our school

Cygnets - Small world play
Nursery - Role-play shed
Nursery - 'Squiggle while you wiggle!'
Nursery - Enjoying Dough Disco 'Roll it'
Nursery - Independent writing in the outdoor 'Jungle Explorers' roleplay
Playtime - Role-play shed
Reception - Mark making in foam in continuous provision
Reception - Blending sounds to read
Reception - Learning to recognise yellow tricky words playing 'Splat Hands'
Reception - Role-play in continuous provision
Reception - Recognising and reading sounds
Reception - Recognising letters of the alphabet
Reception - Segmenting the sounds in simple words
Year 1 - Independent writing
Year 1 - Playing snakes and ladders to practise the digraph 'aw' in Phonics session

Spoken Language

Spoken Language and Listening skills are central to our curriculum; these are developed from Nursery and throughout our school. We nurture our children’s Speaking and Listening skills so that they are capable of expressing their own ideas clearly and confidently, in a safe, supportive and stimulating environment.

We enhance children’s Speaking and Listening skills through a variety of approaches: exploratory play, story time, talk partners, hot seating, PSHE sessions and through collaborative learning across the curriculum. We develop these skills so that our children are capable of expressing their own ideas clearly and with confidence in an environment, where everybody’s views are valued throughout school life and in preparation for their future.

Writing

Writing is an integral part of our curriculum. All of our children are provided with many exciting opportunities to develop and apply their writing knowledge and skills across the curriculum. Our aim is to equip children with the skills needed to be able to orally rehearse, plan, compose, revise and evaluate their writing. We want our children to develop into confident, creative writers who see the value of, and find pleasure in, the writing process. We have high expectations for all pupils within our school and endeavour to ensure that all children make good progress in their writing.

Handwriting

At our school we use Penpals for our handwriting scheme from Nursery to Year 2. Penpals is a complete handwriting scheme that offers clear progression through five developmental stages:

physical preparation for handwriting,
securing correct letter formation,
beginning to join along,
securing the joins and practicing speed,
fluency and developing a personal style.

Penpals is focussed on whole class teaching using interactive resources to enable modelling and interactive learning along with practice books and workbooks to support independent work.

The Foundation content is in line with the Early Years Framework and the Key Stage 1 content is in line with the National Curriculum requirements of frequent, discrete, and direct teaching of handwriting.

Please click on the following link to watch an introduction to Penpals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsufRNXsl2M

To support our teaching of handwriting, we use a specific ‘letter patter’ for each letter to support children with letter formation. Please see below for our letter patter.

Penpals Letter Formation Patter

How to hold your Pencil

howtohelpyouchildathomewithhandwriting-rh

If you are RIGHT handed hold your pencil like this.

howtohelpyouchildathomewithhandwriting-lh

If you are LEFT handed hold your pencil like this.

Our curriculum is organised in a progressive way, ensuring the objectives of the EYFS 2021 Framework and National Curriculum are closely followed. Writing is evident across our curriculum and a wide range of genres are taught throughout the school. To ensure children develop a love of writing and the skills needed to be an effective writer we:

immerse children in high-quality texts and encourage each child to think of themselves as authors,
teach writing through a range of exciting stimuli including film clips, artefacts, visitors and meaningful real-life and first-hand experiences which we hope will excite the children and want them to write,
model the writing process daily to support children’s writing and make expectations clear,
ensure children write for a real purpose and reason,
provide children with opportunities to develop a rich vocabulary to bring their own writing to life,
teach Spelling, Punctuation, Grammar and Phonics explicitly and apply them to texts,
encourage children to use and apply their phonic knowledge in their writing,
teach the children how to proof-read and check their writing makes sense and then, in Year 2, how to make revisions and additions so they can improve their writing,
use a rigorous, sequential approach to teaching handwriting,
ensure children who have gaps in their knowledge receive appropriate support and intervention.

Phonics

At our School, we believe that all our children can become fluent readers and writers. This is why we teach reading through Bug Club Phonics, which is a systematic and synthetic phonics programme. We start teaching phonics in Nursery and follow the Bug Club Phonics progression, which ensures children build on their growing knowledge of the alphabetic code, mastering phonics to read and spell as they move through the school (click the icon below to find out more). As a result, all of our children are able to tackle any unfamiliar words as they read. At our school, we also model the application of the alphabetic code through phonics in shared reading and writing, both inside and outside of the phonics lesson and across the curriculum.

Our WOW Experiences

George the therapy dog listening to readers
Whole School - Author visit, 'Grandad Wheels'
World Book Day - Potato character Rainbow Fish
World Book Day - Potato Paddington character
World Book Day - Reading our favourite books in our pj's
Year 2 - Visit to Stockton Heath Library
Year 2 - Visit to Stockton Heath Library
Year 2 - Visit to Stockton Heath Library
Year 2 - Spelling Bee Winners

We have a strong focus on language development for our children because we know the more children take part in conversations, the more they will understand when they can read and the more vocabulary they will have to draw upon when they can write.

We value reading as a crucial life skill. By the time children leave us, they read confidently for meaning and regularly enjoy reading for pleasure. Our readers are equipped with the tools to tackle unfamiliar vocabulary. We encourage our children to see themselves as readers for both pleasure and purpose.

See what our children think about English in Pupil Voice below.

Pupil Voice

Reception