Intent: 

Bacton Primary School recognises that teaching and learning in English is an essential part of the whole development of all children. It enables them to express themselves creatively and imaginatively and to communicate effectively.

We are committed to ensuring all pupils leave Year 6 communicating, reading and writing with confidence, fluency and understanding, using a range of independent strategies, to take responsibility for their own learning, with a love of reading and a desire to read for enjoyment and with an interest in words and their meanings.

Bacton is a small rural community which is made up of a range of different families. We are therefore aware that children start school with a vast range of experiences, knowledge and language resulting in a considerable gap in some instances. These gaps in the children’s experiences and knowledge are identified quickly and planned for.

Children develop as passionate readers, where reading is used not just to develop their subject specific knowledge, but widen their understanding of their own and other cultures and societies, build their emotional intelligence and grow their imagination. Children will experience the shared reading of a broad range of texts and be motivated to read widely both inside and outside of school. They will build a strong understanding that reading is for gaining information across the curriculum and for pleasure.

Teachers will directly teach ambitious vocabulary drawn from the books and texts read, as well as the wider curriculum and the world around them so that children have a wide vocabulary when they enter secondary school and are able to make connections between texts, their lives and the wider world. Children’s strong understanding of grammar and transcriptions skills enable them as confident writers.

Implementation: 

We understand that children begin their journey as writers, readers and effective communicators in the Early Years and therefore strive to ensure that the children in our Reception class are provided with a language rich environment, both indoors and outdoors.  We nurture a child’s love of learning by expanding on his or her own inquisitive nature. We are responsible for creating an environment of support that allows children to develop their own ideas, express their feelings, take risks, make choices, and most of all, grow to be strong, thinking individuals.

A rigorous programme of systematic synthetic phonics (Bug Club and Rapid)) provides children with the tools to decode, before building fluency and the ability to comprehend and question independently. As children move through the school, they are taught to retrieve, summarise, infer, predict, discuss meaning and make comparisons and links.

Bacton School values the importance of reading for pleasure and with no library in the village; we ensure that all children regularly have access to a range of high quality texts through our Daily Supported Reading and Destination Reader programmes. These programmes offer children the chance to read daily, discuss books in groups and to practise comprehension skills.  We are determined to develop the love of reading in all of our children, without exception.

English is taught using Power of Reading techniques. These techniques provide creative stimuli for the children which encourages them to develop and apply a rich vocabulary. We ensure that our English lessons are based upon the use of high quality texts that install a passion for reading in our children and leave them wanting to find out more. Our school demographic does not reflect a wide range of ethnic or cultural backgrounds so it is of vital importance that we ensure that our children are exposed to books that come from a range of different cultures and literacy heritage.

Our children are given time to respond to a wide range of texts, considering how they would feel in a range of different situations and discussing the morals shown through the actions of different characters. This creative and vocabulary rich beginning to each new text equips children with a range of ideas and skills that they can apply in extended pieces of writing.