Literacy at William Barcroft Junior School is an engaging and exciting subject in which pupils are exposed to a range of high quality novels, picture books and non-fiction texts. All literacy teaching across the school uses a bespoke literacy curriculum to ensure that our children have regular opportunities to read and write across a range of text types and to ensure that they are developing a rich and varied vocabulary. This curriculum incorporates a range of strategies that enable our children to see writing as a means of expression and communication. A high standard of spoken language underpins all of our Literacy teaching and we are constantly striving to develop our children’s speaking and listening skills. Our mission is to ensure that we create a love of reading so that our children can engage with literature beyond the classroom that’s ever present in the world in which we live and work!
Through independent reading, reading skills lessons, shared reading in literacy lessons and cross-curricular sessions, guided reading groups and reading for pleasure, reading in Key Stage 2 develops and extends the skills acquired in Key Stage 1. Children explore a wide variety of genre, both fiction and non-fiction which allows them to access, input ideas and understand what they are reading. They are given opportunities to speculate on the tone and purpose of texts they explore as well as consider both the texts’ themes and audience.
We use the Read, Write, Inc Phonics program as an intervention for those that are still emerging readers when they join our junior school, alongside a book rich curriculum, used to develop our children’s spoken, reading and writing skills. Children have a daily GRASP session which comprises of spelling, handwriting and grammar before they begin their novel based work. Within Literacy, children write across a range of text types including but not limited to: narratives, explanations, descriptions, debates, reports and summaries. Purpose and audience is a key element of our teaching as well as the Alan Peat sentence continuum, which we have embedded across the school and curriculum. We use to support our children with sentence structure and to ensure that they become engaging and interesting writers. Accelerated Reader is used to target some of our children to ensure they are reading appropriate books that challenge and engage them. Action plans and policies can be obtained from the school.
To see literacy in action follow: #wbjsreading #wbjsliteracy #wbjsreadingforpleasure