Our vision is for every child to become a competent writer: writing purposefully and effectively to engage the reader, using a widening range of vocabulary. No child left behind.

The Somerville ENGLISH Curriculum is designed to:

• Expose pupils to a variety of high-quality texts, genres and authors.
• Ensure pupils acquire a wide vocabulary.
• Give children the opportunity to write for a variety of purposes and audiences; clearly, accurately and coherently, adapting their language and style as required.
• Encourage children to take pride in their writing and present their work to a high standard.
• Help pupils to develop an understanding of spelling, punctuation and grammar and to use these appropriately.
• Support children to write in a way that engages the reader
• Provide children with models for writing through the use of high quality texts

WRITING - Approach to Teaching and Learning and Pedagogy

Read to Write – Literacy Counts

This scheme is followed across school, from FS2 to year 6, enabling teachers to provide high-quality teaching of writing through high quality literature. This scheme is split into sequential episodes of learning, covering four main teaching elements: immersion, analysis, planning and writing. These episodes of learning are in every unit, in every year group – ensuring a consistent, whole school approach to teaching and coverage.

Literacy Shed

• Each year group will complete three Literacy Shed film units per year.

READING - Approach to Teaching and Learning and Pedagogy

Our vision is that every child becomes a reader by age six, progressing to fluent readers who foster a love of reading with no child left behind.

The Somerville Reading Curriculum is designed to:-

• Develop pupils’ love of reading to become readers for life.
• Be progressive across the school with text type and questioning.
• Ensure progress is made throughout the school with assessments and tracking.
• Ensure all pupils can read by the age of six.
• Cover a range of themes in the chosen texts for our curriculum.
• Link knowledge from the wider curriculum using carefully selected texts.
• Encourage children to read at home regularly by engaging parents.
• Not leave any child behind by regular assessments and 1:1 tuition.
• Target support when children are underachieving using evidence based interventions.

Early reading

Read Write Inc.

The programme we follow to teach early reading is Read Write Inc.  In FS2, Y1 and underachievers in Y2, Read Write Inc. sessions will take place for an hour daily.  Children will be assessed and grouped half termly with children of the same word reading ability.

In KS2, children who have not attained their expected standard because of phonic ability or fluency will follow the Read Write Inc. programme to build fluency and speed of word reading to enable them to fully access their year group curriculum. 

Shared Reading – Steps to Read

The aim of our shared reading sessions is for children to develop their reading skills and comprehension in a structured situation.  All children will work on the same high quality text, which will be shared as a class. Teachers will follow their year group long term plan of rich and challenging texts from Literacy Counts ‘Steps to Read’ as well as specific texts chosen to fit within our school.

Enrichment Experiences in reading and writing

• Hook
• Curriculum links
• Story snugs
• Book fairs
• World Book Day
• Christmas Story box
• Reading Buddies
• Sponsored reads
• Reading for pleasure weeks

ORACY - Approach to Teaching and Learning and Pedagogy

Our children need to be able to express themselves confidently, articulately and with passion.  Oracy is an ESSENTIAL life skill and underpins the development of reading and writing.  Children need to learn to use their voice in different ways to enhance their life chances and open up a world of learning and choices.  Oracy has a positive impact on academic standards, employability, emotional health and social mobility.  Each week we send home an oracy task with each pupil.  This will be a topic to chat about.  Children will  then be asked in school to recall parts of the conversation.