English

At Fitzmaurice Primary School, we believe English has a crucial role to play in equipping our children with the language skills they need to become successful in every aspect of their life.

Spoken Language

At Fitzmaurice Primary, we recognise that the development of good oral communication skills is vital. We want younger children to learn to articulate their thoughts and feelings through a language rich environment, with high quality dialogue being modelled and encouraged. We want the development of these oracy skills to continue to be a key focus as the children travel through the school.

Reading

At Fitzmaurice Primary, we are passionate about developing confident, fluent readers and promoting Reading for Pleasure as a way to broaden children’s horizons and develop their language skills. We actively encourage ‘book chat’ and informal discussions about what we enjoy reading and celebrate a diverse range of authors to ensure every child feels represented and valued.

Writing

At Fitzmaurice Primary, we are committed to our children becoming competent, motivated writers who can communicate their ideas effectively and efficiently. We believe that the use of a range of genre and stimuli, as well as a variety of text types, will inspire our children to communicate their own ideas and thoughts through writing.

Phonics

Phonics is a systematic way to teach children to read and spell words. It enables children to blend the individual phonemes (the sound letter(s) make) and also supports their spelling to segment (break down) words orally by individual phonemes e.g. d_o_g.

At Fitzmaurice, Phonics is taught daily using Little Wandle Letters and Sounds systematic synthetic phonics programme.  Should you wish to explore this further the Little Wandle website has many resources which may help you to support your child at home.

https://www.littlewandlelettersandsounds.org.uk/resources/for-parents/  

 OFSTED March 2024 stated: 

'Pupils develop a love of reading across the school. Children learn to read soon after they start school. Staff use assessment with precision to identify pupils who find reading difficult. Pupils who fall behind quickly receive the help they need to catch up. As they move through the school, pupils secure the knowledge they need to read with accuracy and fluency'.

Children undertake a statutory screening check at the end of Year 1. The phonics screening check is a short and simple assessment of phonic decoding. It consists of a list of 40 words, half real words and half non-words, which Year 1 children read to a teacher by applying their phonic knowledge. Administering the assessment usually takes between four and nine minutes per child.

The check is designed to confirm whether individual pupils have learnt phonic decoding to an appropriate standard and have grasped the essential skills that underpin good reading.