Reading Intent

At Cowbit St Mary’s Church of England Primary School, we intend to create confident readers who have the ability to develop a deep and true understanding of what they read and appreciate the importance and value of reading. We aim to foster and promote a love of reading, fluency and a secure ability to comprehend information. It is important for us that children are able to comprehend at a high level rather than just sight read. We aim to create a love of reading through encouraging reading at home and working closely with parents to do this is vital. In order to foster a love of reading across various genres, we aim to expose children to a wide range of texts and purchase books accordingly. As part of our diversity and equality ethos, we are committed to purchasing books that represent our children and community through characters and authors. Our learning around reading both in terms of decoding and comprehension is based on the objectives as outlined in the National Curriculum.

English at Cowbit St Mary’s Church of England Primary School is a rich, inspiring curriculum in its own right, but also provides skills which open the door to the depth and breadth of our curriculum as a whole.

Aims

At Cowbit St Mary’s Church of England Primary School, we want our children to:

• Read confidently and fluently and seek to acquire knowledge independently.
• Develop a lifelong enjoyment of reading, taking genuine pleasure from what they read.
• Develop the reading skills they need to access all areas of the curriculum.
• Understand the meaning of what they read and what is read to them.
• Read critically to ascertain what the truth is in a statement so that they may gain a balanced understanding of local, national and international issues.
• Make responses to what they read justifying those responses.
• Become immersed in other worlds…both real and imagined!

Writing Intent

At Cowbit St Mary’s Church of England Primary School, we understand that writing is an essential skill. We want all children to be able to confidently communicate their knowledge, ideas and emotions to become confident writers that can reach their full potential.

We aim to help our children develop these skills in the following ways:

• introducing and deconstructing a wide variety of model texts, covering a variety of genres,
• by exposing and teaching high level vocabulary,
• giving children opportunities to write for authentic purposes and across a range of subjects,
• ensuring children have opportunities to talk about and plan their writing,
• a solid understanding of grammar and ability to use it accurately,
• giving children opportunity to evaluate, revise and edit their own work as well as offer feedback on the work of their peers,
• to be able to spell, not only the prescribed spelling words but also words connected to the wider curriculum,
• take pride in their work and its presentation, including their handwriting.

It is our intent to provide high quality learning experiences in order to develop pupils’ competence in both transcription (spelling and handwriting) and composition (articulating ideas and structuring them in speech and writing).  Pupils will learn how to plan, revise and evaluate their writing effectively.  They will be able to write down their ideas fluently, spelling words quickly and accurately by knowing the relationship between sounds and letters in words. The development of pupils’ composition skills will ensure they can form, articulate and communicate ideas, organise them coherently for a reader, showing an awareness of the audience, purpose and context, and an increasingly wide knowledge of vocabulary and grammar.   We aim to encourage pupils to develop fluent, legible and, eventually, speedy handwriting.