Literacy
Our literacy curriculum is split into two areas; how we teach reading and how we teach writing.
Reading:
Children begin to develop reading skills at a very young age, as you look at books with children they begin to develop an awareness of language and begin to make connections between the stories they are hearing and the pictures on the page. As they progress through the journey of learning to read they begin to understand how books work and begin to make links between the symbols on the page and written words.
Then with phonological knowledge children become able to decode the words on the page and learn to read themselves. We understand that learning to read is a complex process for children to undertake and that there are different strands within our reading curriculum to support this. We have our reading curriculum alongside our library policy and our core book planning. All these contribute towards the implementation of our reading curriculum.
As a school we have a set of 26 core books that children follow. Each core book is supported with a set of carefully thought through and creative activities that allows children to explore the book further, gaining a greater understanding. Through their time at Fairfield children will have the opportunity to explore all these core books and develop their reading comprehension and knowledge. Children can also access a range of fiction and non-fiction books to support their lines of enquiry.
Please click on the link below to see one example of our core book planning.
We're Going on a Bear Hunt - Michael Rosen
Writing:
We want children to be passionate about learning and be inspired to write. At Fairfield we ensure there is an inclusive approach to writing and this is threaded through our environment and into each area of provision. Giving children the opportunity to develop their mark making skills and exploring making marks in different media's. We aspire for children to develop a 'want' to write attitude and for them to understand that writing is a purpose of communication. We seek to developing children's oral language, speaking and listening skills and broadening children's vocabulary for them to apply these skills when learning to write down there thoughts and ideas.
We looked at the writing curriculum in the development matters and split the process of learning to write into 4 areas:
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Pre-emergent writers.
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Composition - Organising talk, understanding thoughts and stories can be written down, own ideas and reasons to write.
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Transcription - Oral segmenting and blending words, forming letters and writing familiar words and simple sentences.
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Handwriting.
Children progress through different stages when learning to write and do this at their own pace. We work closely with children to support them through each phase of this journey and help them develop and imbed this so they are able to reach the next stage;
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Children develop their gross motor skills and fine motor skills.
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Children’s drawings that represent writing.
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Marks or scribbles that the child intends to be writing, known as scribbling.
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Wavy scribbles that imitate cursive writing and have a left to right progression. Child pretends to write words.
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Letters and marks that resemble letter shapes.
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Strings of letters that do not create words. Written from left to right. Including upper and lower case letters.
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Letters with spaces in between to resemble words: letters/ words copied from environmental print. Some letters may be reversed, known as letter strings.
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Different ways to represent the sounds in words. The first letter of the word or beginning and ending sounds represent the entire word, known as phonetical spelling.
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Words with beginning, middle and end letter sounds.
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Correct spelling of words, generally children’s names and familiar words such as mum or dad. Sentences with punctuation and correct use of upper and lower case letters.