English

Our Vision

Literacy is fundamental, not only to our personal and social development, but also to our ability to understand, evaluate, dissect and disseminate knowledge and, consequently, to our ability to function effectively in society. Therefore, at Hartwell, we believe our children should be given every opportunity possible to develop their reading, writing and speaking and listening skills that they may cultivate the tools necessary for a happy and successful life.

We are committed to ensuring that our children:

• have the necessary tools to access the curriculum;
• are able to transfer knowledge, ideas and skills between subject areas;
• recognise the importance of and enjoy reading for pleasure;
• recognise the value of writing and communicating effectively;
• are able to continue their literacy development beyond their primary school career.

These fundamental, life-enhancing skills are delivered through an extensive programme of literacy initiatives:

• a range of interventions to support underachieving and lower ability students
• differentiated activities designed to meet the needs of all children
• opportunities to read for pleasure;
• cross-curricular vocabulary development and language books for KS2 children;
• Accelerated Reader programme;
• a range of literacy activities in all subjects across the curriculum;
• the explicit modelling of writing;
• exciting opportunities to develop speaking and listening opportunities, for example drama and debating.

The Subject Leader

It is my pleasure to lead Literacy at Hartwell as our children love to read and love to use their oracy skills to share their understanding, which is always a pleasure to behold. To ensure our children receive the best education, I monitor teaching and learning through lesson observations, book scrutinies and I gather pupil voice. This enables me to gain a solid picture of strengths and weaknesses in school and to take action, where necessary. I also ensure teachers have the relevant resources to teach literacy effectively. I am able to invest in high-quality resources for learners to use both inside and outside the classroom and online resources for teachers. This ensures teachers can plan exciting lessons for our children. Finally, as part of my role, I attend relevant CPD courses and disseminate any useful information to staff. I have enjoyed training the staff and keeping their skill set up to date so that they can teach as effectively as possible. This is usually in the form of staff meetings. The aim of these is to improve standards of teaching and learning.

Pupil Voice

We consider it important to gather the pupil’s views throughout the school year. The view the latest pupil surveys and the analysis generated from them please click below:

Pupil Voice Survey

SMSC in Literacy

Literacy School Development Plan

The Literacy Curriculum at Hartwell

At Hartwell, the National Curriculum objectives covered in yearly long-term maps that ensure Fiction, Non Fiction and Poetry are covered effectively each term and across each Key Stage. Literacy is central to all curriculum topics and through the different genres that we study; children are able to express their understanding in a variety of ways. Throughout our long-term maps, key texts are planned for and celebrated as an important vehicle for learning in Literacy:

Curriculum overview - EYFS

Long term map - year 1

Long term map - year 2

Long term map - year 3

Long term map - year 4

Long term map - year 5

Long term map - year 6

The objectives for Literacy in KS1 and KS2 are clearly set out for each year group in the National Curriculum. They are as follows in the National Curriculum programme of study:

National curriculum in England: English programmes of study

This is our English policy:

Hartwell Primary School English Policy

Home Resources

Bronze spellings

Silver spellings

Gold spellings

Platinum spellings

Diamond spellings

Reading is at the heart of our curriculum. We encourage children to develop a positive attitude towards all kind of literature and believe that parents play a vital role in this process. We are a school that is passionate about books and reading. Last year alone we read 52,000,000 words, which is fantastic and our love of books just keeps growing. In fact, we aim for all of our children to be life-long bookworms who access books to: find out information, relax and learn about the world around them.

We want the children in our school to:

• Enjoy reading all genre of books and appreciate the value and worth of reading in everyday life.
• Read a range of different kinds of reading material fluently and with understanding
• Make choices about the sorts of texts that they enjoy
• Use reading skills to search for information
• Use a full range of reading cues (e.g. phonics, grammar and context)
• Read ‘between the lines’ and behind the images
• Be exposed to literature that is beyond their current experience and fluency.

Throughout the school day, children are provided with many opportunities to develop and strengthen their literacy skills. These include:

• Daily phonics sessions in Early Years Foundation Stage and Key Stage 1
• Daily supported reading sessions in Year 1
• A focused reading programme in KS2 which allows for discussion, analysis and written responses to text
• Focus texts used in literacy lessons
• Home reading books and a reading diary to record in
• A class novel or story book.
• Opportunities to role play and act out fictional scenes

Where it has been identified that children need additional support to meet age related expectations, the school offer a range of intervention support strategies including:

• ‘Inference Training’- designed to support those who decode well but need support to comprehend texts
• Switch On- designed to support those who find decoding words difficult.
• Additional 1:1 reading with an adult or volunteer

We use Accelerated Reader at Hartwell for some children in KS2 (and some in Year 2 also) as a vehicle to assess and encourage readers. After finishing a book, the children take part in a short quiz, which gives them a word count that the children feverishly add to their total, which is readily celebrated in class.

In KS1, children read from a range of texts that complement the phonics that they are working on during morning phonics sessions and enable them to develop confidence and accuracy with their use. If children find reading challenging, we have a range of interventions that are designed to boost both their phonics knowledge and reading comprehension.

Our Library:

Our library is the hub of the school and is always full of children of all ages searching for books or treasuring books whilst snuggled on beanbags. Our library is stocked full of books that reflect a range of cultures and genres that reflect our exciting and vibrant world.

We have a valuable group of KS2 Library Guardians who dedicatedly applied for the post and were selected based on their passion for books. Our Library Guardians work hard to :

• Canvass book requests from children
• Run books fairs and decide how the revenue will be spent
• Keep the library running smoothly by tidying and categorising books
• Share their own book recommendations
• Run a twice weekly reading club at lunchtimes

Reading Progression

The document that we use to ensure progression at Hartwell is:

Reading progression

Reading policy

Reading at Home

Reading at home is vitally important so please take a moment to read our booklet on home reading:

Parent leaflet

Success in any curriculum area depends upon good basic writing skills. It provides pupils with an important form of self-expression and creativity as well as making available to them the power of the written word.

Structure of lessons:

The programmes of study for writing at key stages 1 and 2 consist of two dimensions:

• transcription (spelling and handwriting)
• composition (articulating ideas and structuring them in speech and writing)

Effective composition involves forming, articulating and communicating ideas, and then organising them coherently for a reader. This requires clarity, awareness of the audience, purpose and context, and an increasingly wide knowledge of vocabulary and grammar.

From Year 1 upwards the children have daily literacy lessons.  Grammar and punctuation are an embedded part of every lesson.

Lessons are set within a creative and context which is relevant to children. Typically, this will involve using high quality age appropriate texts to provide models of genre construct and appropriate vocabulary. An audience is identified so there is always a purpose for writing. Within literacy lessons, children are given the opportunity to engage in activities such as:

• Text analysis- used to gather powerful language and analyse the key features of a genre and its effect on the reader
• Reading and research
• Spoken language
• Drama and oracy techniques
• From Year 3 onwards, children use their own personal language books to house powerful language that they have gathered both in and out of literacy sessions.

Handwriting is taught as an embedded skill as well as separately to the writing lesson.

• Handwriting policy

The teaching of SPAG (Spelling, Punctuation and Grammar) is taught both in stand-alone sessions but it is also woven throughout our day-to-day teaching so that children are able to build up their knowledge of their appropriate uses in their day-to-day writing.

• SPAG policy