Intent:

At Bishop Hooper School, our aim is to inspire children with a love of literature and language while providing them with the skills and knowledge to become adept readers and writers, able to access and contribute to the purpose and audience of the writers of today, and the future.

We want all our children to experience reading and writing opportunities from their earliest days in our school and build on each and every child's interests in order to foster and promote a love of reading and writing.

Implementation:

Early literacy experiences are engaging, rich and varied. Songs, rhymes and texts are used to capture enthusiasm from their very first days on school.

We use the FFT (Fischer Family Trust) Success for All Phonics scheme from Butterflies Nursery which has been proven to have a dramatic effect on children's progress and attainment, that is positive and long-lasting. Children are taught early sounds in engaging daily lessons which support effective progression through a clear structure, based on the six phases of Letters and Sounds, including reading, writing and spelling skills. Phonics is taught throughout the school to provide additional support to learners up to Year 6, where appropriate.

Our daily English lessons are taught using the Literacy Tree scheme as the basis of in-depth planning and resources. Literacy Tree is a complete, book-based approach which uses high quality, diverse children's literature by significant authors, both traditional and modern and covering a variety of genre.

We immerse children in a world of literary worlds and themes, heightening engagement and creating curiosity through process drama, discussion and debate. This allows our children to see themselves represented and also explore the lives and experiences of others.

Our curriculum is designed so that children repeatedly meet objectives over the course of an academic year and beyond. 

Our carefully planned sequences of lessons provide opportunities to explore writing conventions which are embedded, and apply them into authentic writing for a range of real-life audiences. The technical aspects of grammar and spelling are woven into the weekly plans and taught explicitly. Children in KS1 and 2 are given weekly spellings to practise in school and at home. The spellings are taken from the appropriate key stage statutory spelling lists, the Literacy scheme and from high-frequency and Common Exception Word lists.

Early phonics and texts progress onto our whole school reading scheme Bug Club. We have an extensive range of texts of all genres to match all ages and abilities. Children take home a reading book to share at home. Reading books are changed regularly and levels adjusted when appropriate. Fluency and comprehension is explicitly taught and embedded through prediction and inference.

All children have access to our vibrant and extensive collection of books in our school library and are encouraged to take out books on a weekly basis. Pupils are regularly invited to suggest new authors and texts for purchase to extend our library further, with books that they enjoy reading. We encourage our children to share their reading tastes with others through book and author recommendations.