t Yox Valley we recognise that the English curriculum is an essential vehicle for communicating ideas, emotions, understanding, and learning in discrete daily lessons and in all other curriculum areas for all our children.  It is our intent to provide a high-quality education in English that will teach pupils to speak, read and write fluently during their time with us and beyond, on into adult life. 

The importance of English is emphasised by the 'Moving English Forward' document produced by Ofsted in 2012:

"There can be no more important subject than English in the school curriculum. English is a pre-eminent world language; it is at the heart of our culture, and it is the language medium in which most of our pupils think and communicate. Literacy skills are also crucial to pupils' learning in other subjects across the curriculum."

Writing at Yox Valley

 Teachers plan English lessons to ensure pupil progression from phase to phase, class to class and unit to unit.  Children develop their writing skills following a clear sequence of learning, which involves the teacher selecting a real text, a high quality publication that can be used in a unit of work to promote and develop children’s creativity and technical writing abilities, whilst promoting that real love and passion for reading.  Wherever possible these texts are selected in collaboration with our wider curriculum to create that fully immersive, exciting cross-curricular links.

 

Reading at Yox Valley

At Yox Valley we have the greatest wish that all of our students build the strongest foundations for a lifelong love of reading. We recognise that reading is invaluable as a tool for wellbeing, as a stimulus for the imagination and is completely fundamental to everyday life.  We intend to embed an appreciation for reading across the curriculum as well as to teach the skills of comprehension and decoding systematically and rigorously. We have now introduced Boom Reader for our Hub, to enable our pupils reading both at school and at home. 

Phonics at Yox Valley

Essential Letters and Sounds (ELS) is our chosen phonics programme. The aim of ELS is ‘getting all children to read well, quickly’. It teaches children to read by identifying the phonemes (the smallest unit of sound) and graphemes (the written version of the sound) within words and using these to read words.

Children begin learning phonics at the very beginning of Reception and it is explicitly taught every day during a dedicated slot on the timetable. Children are given the knowledge and the skills to then apply this independently.

Throughout the day, children will use their growing phonics knowledge to support them in other areas of the curriculum and will have many opportunities to practise their reading. This includes reading 1:1 with a member of staff, with a partner during paired reading and as a class. 

Children continue daily phonics lessons in Year 1 and further through the school to ensure all children become confident, fluent readers.

We follow the ELS progression and sequence. This allows our children to practise their existing phonic knowledge whilst building their understanding of the ‘code’ of our language GPCs (Grapheme Phoneme Correspondence). As a result, our children can tackle any unfamiliar words that they might discover. 

Children experience the joy of books and language whilst rapidly acquiring the skills they need to become fluent independent readers and writers. ELS teaches relevant, useful and ambitious vocabulary to support each child’s journey to becoming fluent and independent readers.

We begin by teaching the single letter sounds before moving to digraphs ‘sh’ (two letters spelling one sound), trigraphs ‘igh’ (three letters spelling one sound) and quadgraphs ‘eigh’ (four letters spelling one sound).

We teach children to:

• Decode (read) by identifying each sound within a word and blending them together to read fluently
• Encode (write) by segmenting each sound to write words accurately.

The structure of ELS lessons allows children to know what is coming next, what they need to do, and how to achieve success. This makes it easier for children to learn the GPCs we are teaching (the alphabetic code) and how to apply this when reading.

ELS is designed on the principle that children should ‘keep up’ rather than ‘catch up’. Since interventions are delivered within the lesson by the teacher, any child who is struggling with the new knowledge can be immediately targeted with appropriate support. Where further support is required, 1:1 intervention is used where needed. These interventions are short, specific and effective. 

Supporting Reading at Home:

• Children will only read books that are entirely decodable, this means that they should be able to read these books as they already know the code contained within the book.
• We only use pure sounds when decoding words (no ‘uh’ after the sound)
• We want children to practise reading their book 4 times across the week working on these skills:

                Decode – sounding out and blending to read the word.

                Fluency – reading words with less obvious decoding.

                Expression – using intonation and expression to bring the text to life!

We must use pure sounds when we are pronouncing the sounds and supporting children in reading words. If we mispronounce these sounds, we will make reading harder for our children. Please watch the videos below for how to accurately pronounce these sounds.

More support for parents and carers can be found here:

https://home.oxfordowl.co.uk/reading/reading-schemes-oxford-levels/essential-letters-and-sounds/  

 

Spelling at Yox Valley

From Year 2 onwards (once children are familiar with Phase 5 Phonics), spelling is taught at Yox Valley using the Spelling Shed spelling programme of learning. Each week, a new pattern is introduced, linked to previous knowledge and practised with examples in context. Teaching supports pupils to apply their phonics skills and make etymological links.   This involves discreet lessons –daily sessions at Year 2 and 5 x 15 minute sessions a fortnight at KS2.  Children consolidate their understanding and apply these skills in all other areas of the curriculum.

Handwriting at Yox Valley

To support spelling and develop good handwriting habits from the start we teach a cursive handwriting script supported by the on-line resource Letter-join.