Reading

Our RWI Lead is Mrs Brackstone.
Our Reading Lead is Mrs Defreitas.
Reading is the ‘golden thread’ woven throughout the curriculum and environment at Caldmore Primary Academy, with the following specific aims:
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  • To foster a love of reading within every child
  • To broaden children’s vocabulary and ameliorate the research-based correlation between limited vocabulary and social background
  • To develop fluent, confident readers
  • To ensure all children benefit from inspiring, engaging, high quality texts
  • To enable full curriculum access for every child
  • To equip every child with the skills needed to read for meaning, purpose and pleasure
  • To empower every child by increasing their knowledge and cultural capital
  • To further promote the academy’s unwaveringly high expectations of and for all pupils, embodied in our motto, ‘Aspire, Believe, Achieve’
At Caldmore Primary Academy, we follow RWI until we can read all of our sounds with fluency. When we finish RWI, we move into whole-class reading.
Reading is taught using a key fiction text which we follow for a term. We use poetry and a wide range of non-fiction texts to deepen our understanding of the key text. You can see each year group’s current class text on their class page.
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Vocabulary is a huge part of reading and key to our lessons. We regularly explore new vocabulary within our text to ensure we can fully understand the meaning behind the text. We explore vocabulary using Word Aware strategies and colourful semantics.
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Children are expected to read at home regularly with a minimum of 3 times a week. This is monitored by class teachers.

Writing/Literacy

Our Writing Lead is Mrs Bradley.

Through our literacy lessons, we aim to guide and nurture each individual on their own personal journeys to becoming successful writers.  We:

  • Use high-quality texts to unpick grammar and literary features.
  • Ensure lessons are focused around grammar focuses.
  • Follow an ‘unpick features, vocabulary understanding, inference, practice features, planning, composition and editing’ system (see below).
  • Use pre-planned and adapted schemes of work and WordSmith to support planning.
  • Ensure children are taught grammatical features throughout literacy.
  • Use a variety of both fiction and non-fiction units, which are covered in a cyclic fashion also, with year groups constantly revisiting genres of writing.
  • Use Teacher Assessment Frameworks for both staff and pupils to help guide their learning and set high standards.
  • Use flashbacks to build on pupil’s previous learning and literary knowledge.
  • Use colourful semantics to embed grammatical terms and features and encourage pupils to form grammatically correct sentences.
  • Use Word Aware to broaden our understanding of vocabulary.
  • Use ‘in the moment’ marking to ensure children get high quality feedback on their writing immediately and any misconceptions between pupil and adult can be unpicked.
  • Literacy lessons have a 10-minute handwriting session which focuses on formation and size.

Handwriting

Effective teaching of handwriting can only be achieved through modelling. Teachers must demonstrate letter formation and joins regularly and children must practice by carefully copying and repeating .It is important to observe children writing to ensure they are forming letters correctly.

  • Handwriting is taught explicitly, in daily 10 minute sessions as part of our literacy lesson. It is modelled by the teacher then supervised, with in the moment marking given. .
  • Where possible, it is linked to phonic and spelling patterns.
  • We have high expectations of handwriting. Children need to repeat work that is not satisfactory.
  • We no longer use pen licenses and give children the choice of what to write with.
  • Teachers model good handwriting at all times, e.g. when writing on the whiteboard and when marking books.

Spelling

  • Children are taught spellings of words directly and discretely using syllables and methods to help the children remember where there may be misconceptions.
  • We use RWI Spelling to introduce spelling patterns and for support, alongside the National Curriculum framework.
  • Children are tested once a week
  • Scores are kept in a spreadsheet by each class, children with less then half marks to have extra intervention time to learn these, children scoring 0/1 to be put on a NESSY intervention.
  • Spelling scores are monitored by Writing Lead.