Phonics and Spelling

Bishop Parker follows the Sounds Write programme from Reception through to Year 2, thus allowing children to hear, identify and use sounds in order to allow them to read and spell successfully. Sounds Write focuses on the key skills of segmenting, blending and phoneme manipulation.

In Key Stage 2 (KS2), children continue to develop and build upon these skills by completing weekly spelling zone interventions. Spelling words will be sent home on a weekly basis for all children, from Year 1 to Year 6, thus developing and building upon these skills.

Reading

At Bishop Parker, we want to develop a love of reading, expose our children to a broad vocabulary and equip them with the skills to read and understand a wide range of texts. Children are exposed to a range of high-quality texts and are given the opportunity to explore these texts through a variety of activities. Children have daily reading lessons and partake in various reading interventions to improve their comprehension, inference, prediction and vocabulary. Children also spend time reading with an adult and partaking in the Accelerated Reader programme. In KS2, children also develop these core reading skills by partaking in short read interventions and weekly Reading Vipers activities which focus on the skills of Inference, prediction, explanation, retrieval, vocabulary and summarising.

Writing

In daily English lessons, reading and writing are closely linked to the children’s History and Geography work and we continue to maintain this strong cross-curricular focus.

Knowledge and skills are built upon as children progress through the school years. The two weekly teaching sequence - Explore > Design > Draft > Evaluate > Publish – is consistently applied across KS1 and KS2.

Children develop into confident writers. By the end of KS2 they have the skills needed to write coherently and accurately in a range of genres, adapting their style to suit the audience. They are able to write their ideas clearly and fluently. They have knowledge of grammar conventions to enable them to write successfully. They develop a wide vocabulary. They have the necessary skills for transcription (handwriting and spelling) and composition.

Learning Sequence at Bishop Parker:

Text immersion- identify key features within a text

Employ gained knowledge (success criteria grammar based)

Produce an effective plan

Draft with purpose

Edit an improve draft

Publish