English Subject Leader: Miss Tang
At Kaye’s Academy, we believe that the skills of English are at the heart of children’s learning. We aim to inspire our children to become fluent, confident life-long readers who can discuss the joy of literature as well as develop their own style and expression through wide opportunities for writing.
We aim to empower and enrich our children’s vocabulary to prepare them for the next stage in their educational journey (and beyond) so that no child is hindered or held back by a deficit of language.
We believe that reading is at the heart of all learning. Without good reading skills, it is difficult to access other areas of the curriculum, therefore reading skills are essential. We believe that children should be immersed in reading throughout the school day and time is given for whole class, group and individual reading with adults.
We believe that children need good writing skills to communicate what they know and understand. We teach children to write neatly and concisely to communicate their ideas effectively. We aim to inspire children by providing them with a range of carefully chosen texts across a range of writing genres. These are often linked to their topics so that children are fully immersed and engaged in learning.
At Kaye’s, we develop the love of reading and writing through a commitment to providing high quality English education. We follow the National Curriculum and Early Years Framework.
Phonics
In Foundation Stage and KS1 we follow a systematic synthetic phonic based programme. We teach phonics using the Phonics Bug scheme in Reception and KS1.This programme is used daily to teach children key phonics skills such as grapheme (letter) and phoneme (sound) correspondence and oral blending and segmenting of sounds. These skills are then developed further so that the children can blend sounds to read and segment sounds to spell. Alongside developing the children’s phonics skills, they also learn to read and spell high frequency and common exception words.
Definitions
A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in a word.
A grapheme is the letter or letters representing a phoneme.
A digraph is two letters that make one sound.
A trigraph is three letters that make one sound.
A split digraph is when the two letters making the sound are not adjacent.
Blending is recognising the letter sounds in a written word and merging them in order in which they are written to pronounce
Segmenting is identifying the individual sounds in a spoken word and writing down letters for each sound to form the word
What is the phonics screening check?
Children in Year 1 throughout the country will all be taking part in a phonics screening check during the same week in June.
This will commence week beginning Monday 9th June 2025.
Children in Year 2 will also take the check if they did not achieve the required result when in Year 1 or if they have not taken the test before.
Bug Club Phonics
Each child in Reception to Year 1 have access to an online account for Phonics Bug Active Learn. Each child has a personalised homepage where they'll find the eBooks they've been allocated by the teacher and motivating rewards. The online reading world ensures children can access independent reading resources anywhere at any time.
Username: first 4 letters of first name and first 4 letters of surname
Password: kayesfirst2079
School Code: 79qc
If you have any problems accessing the account, message your class teacher on Dojo.
You can log in on the following link www.activelearnprimary.co.uk
Supporting your child at home
There are a number of things that parents can do to support phonics and early reading development:
- Make time for your child to read their school book to you
- With all books, encourage your child to ‘sound out’ unfamiliar words and then blend from left to right rather than looking at pictures to guess
- Immerse your child in a love of reading by promoting it
Games and online resources
Phonics Pupil Voice
Reading
At Kaye’s we are passionate about reading and we believe this it is one of the most important skills that your child will learn at our school. We believe in the importance of developing children’s phonics skills as early readers and moving onto comprehension skills when children are ready. We also understand the importance to develop children’s love of books and reading.
Once children have grasped phonics, we move on to develop their reading comprehension skills through Book Study sessions. During these sessions, children fully immerse themselves in a novel and analysis it. We use VIPERS to develop comprehension skills. Books are carefully chosen across school to ensure children receive a varied and exciting reading diet. In addition, children take home books to read which include schemes such as Oxford Reading Tree, Project X and a range of ‘real’ books. We encourage children to read every evening at home and we encourage adults to ask questions about what they have read to develop their comprehension skills. To further develop the love of reading, children enjoy storytime at the end of the school day where teachers enthusiastically read a novel.
When you are reading with your child, use these VIPERS sentence stems to guide you with your questioning.
Our Curriculum in Action
Reception - matching adjectives to characters
Reception - 100 reads at home!
Year 4 - Book Club
Year 1 - World Book Day, read your way
Year 1 - writing about the weather
Year 5 - Sat on the author's chair sharing their writing
Year 1 and Year 5 - paired reading
Year 2 - writing about Remembrance Day for Open Classroom
Year 5 - performance poetry
Reading Pupil Voice
Writing
At Kaye’s, we believe that English is a fundamental life skill. We believe that writing must allow children to use their imagination and engage with a range of genres. It is also crucial that we teach children grammar concepts that enable them to become proficient and accurate writers providing them with life-long writing skills. Our aim is for children to leave our school being passionate and confident writers.
At Kaye’s, all of our writing is driven through a love and exploration of high quality texts. To develop writing, we start in Nursery with rhyming, repetition and orally retelling stories using visual story maps. This moves into Reception and in Year 1, where children continue to engage high quality texts, learn new vocabulary and orally rehearse sentences that they can begin to write. In Years 2-6, we use a 2-3 week writing cycle. This starts with a hook which is used to engage children and create excitement and motivation for writing. Texts are read and re-read, and children learn how to become authors themselves, finally publishing their work and having it displayed in their classrooms. Often, our class book becomes the basis of our writing cycles within our immersive
English Writing Genre Overview 2024 - 2025
Our Curriculum in Action
Year 4 – online author event with Matt Lucas
Year 4 – planning their character descriptions
Year 5 - performing Viking poetry
Year 2 – publishing their diaries
Young Author Competition Winners
Writing Pupil Voice
Handwriting
At Kaye’s, we focus on handwriting from Nursery through to Year 5. Regular handwriting practise are planned within the school day following the scheme, Letter Join.
Spelling
We focus on spelling right from Reception where children learn to spell using their phonics and learn tricky words. From Year 2 – 5, children learn spellings through spelling lesson, focusing on etymology, syllables and phoneme maps. Children are given weekly spellings to learn which they can practise at home using spelling games on Spelling Shed.
The National Curriculum