English at Flora Gardens underpins all aspects of our education and school community. At Flora Gardens we expect all our pupils to develop into thoughtful readers and creative writers and it is through the ‘Talk for Writing’ approach that we believe we can achieve this – CLICK HERE. The multi-sensory and interactive teaching style of this enables pupils of all ages and abilities to learn to write a wide range of story/text types.
Talk for Writing starts with enjoying and sharing stories. Throughout the school, we place a strong emphasis on pupils reading stories and enjoying a range of literature. Through regular reading, we want pupils to build up an extensive and rich vocabulary for use in their own writing.
Pupils in Early years and KS1 read quality picture books daily with focused activities linked to their weekly/termly text.
In KS2 the pupils have a termly whole class text which is used for reading homework and Monday Read and Respond lessons. Pupils enjoy having the time to discuss the text as a class whilst building on literacy skills along with the pleasure of reading longer stories and novels.
“Reading and writing for enjoyment are two of the most powerful ways of getting children reading. Read & Respond provides exactly this.” Michael Morpurgo
Bug Club homework site is also used for reading along with phonics, grammar and spelling – CLICK HERE. The pupils all have an individual log in and password and our school code is GM3W.
All this is preceded by excellent phonic teaching using the DfES Letters and Sounds programme combined with Read, Write Inc and Jolly Phonic resources.
Last year we had a whole school Pokémon reading competition – Detail of our Pokemon reading competition can be found here.