English

Reading

At Wygate Park Academy we believe that reading is an essential life skill and we are committed to enabling our children to become lifelong readers. We aim to provide children with a literacy-rich environment, high quality texts and inspiring learning opportunities, which will help them to gain a life-long enjoyment of reading, as well as read accurately, fluently and with understanding.

Alongside our approach with phonics, we focus on ensuring that all children at Wygate are taught the skills needed to analyse, discuss and compare books they have read with confidence. We focus on key skills within our guided reading lessons, including retrieval and inference. This enables the children to study and understand the texts read to a high level. We place a large focus upon our vocabulary learning at Wygate, with each classroom environment showing a clear progression and demonstrating the importance of high-level vocabulary understanding. Within our reading sequences, we ensure a large amount of emphasis is place upon practicing oral skills and we ensure that we are always promoting discussions around the texts we look out. The children learn key skills in reading aloud, taking part in activities to develop prosody and oracy.

We have created a reading for pleasure culture within our school. Each classroom has a class text which is read aloud daily to the children to promote a love of reading and our book corners within classrooms are used as mini libraries to display key texts recommended not only by staff, but also by the students. We encourage book talk throughout all of the school and this can be heard within reading lessons, within our outdoor reading environment or even as you walk down the corridor for playtime. The children love reading and discussing the books they have read. Each week we have a ‘Drop Everything and Read’ session to promote the importance and excitement of reading and our staff love joining in with this time too.

Each year group has a dedicated reading spine which is full of high quality texts to enrich the curriculum and their reading experiences. Each text has been hand picked and will allow the children to access a wide range of literature as they journey throughout school. These reading spines are developed and evaluated regularly, with new and upcoming literature being added.

We are proud holders of the Lincolnshire Reading Pledge Gold Award - click here to see our certificate.

Writing

We strive to help our children develop into articulate and imaginative communicators, who are well-equipped with the basic skills they need to become life-long learners. We aim to ensure all of our children develop a genuine love of language and the written word, through a text-based approach; this links closely to the way we teach reading. Careful links are made across the curriculum to ensure that children’s English learning is relevant and meaningful and to ensure that children are exposed to a wide range of texts and stimuli. We ensure that children develop an understanding of how widely writing is used in everyday life and, therefore, how important and useful the skills are that they are learning.

Within our writing curriculum, we ensure that all of our writing is for a purpose and we focus around four purposes – to entertain, to inform, to persuade and to discuss. We want all of our children to see themselves as real writers and to take ownership of their writing. It is important that the children see writing as an interesting and enjoyable process, whilst acquiring the ability to organise and plan their written work.