Literacy
At Rossmore, our aim is to ensure all children reach their full potential in Reading and Writing. We strive to provide quality teaching to ensure all children develop a love of learning and lifelong literacy skills for their future. We have a language rich and exciting Literacy curriculum that provides opportunities for reading, writing and discussion. We expose all children to a wide variety of quality, language-rich texts and resources to motivate and inspire them.
Phonics
At Rossmore we teach from a systematic, synthetic phonics programme using principles from Letters and Sounds across the EYFS and KS1. This is supported by a set of consistent resources throughout the school to support the effective delivery of phonics lessons. Teachers have clear expectations that are laid out term by term - see Phonics progression attached. Discrete phonics lessons take place daily across Reception and KS1. For those learners in KS2 who are not able to reognise all graphemes, we put in place daily interventions to ensure they catch up to their peers quickly and make accelerated progress. Children in KS1 who are not keeping up with the pace will have additional 'keep up' interventions daily.
Phonic assessments are carried out half termly alongside formative assessments in daily lessons. Daily assessments allow teachers to target children with a quick, catch up intervention on the same day.
Reading
Early reading is taught during daily Phonics lessons in Reception and Key Stage One and reading books are matched to children’s Phonic knowledge. We use guided reading sessions in Reception and Key Stage One to provide focused early reading practice as well as in Key Stage 2 to support those in need of additional intervention. Whole class shared reading sessions happen throughout the Key Stages where all children have the opportunity to develop their reading skills and discuss texts in detail.
In Key Stage 2, we use the Accelerated Reader programme. This is a computer programme that monitors your child's independent reading practice. From the end of Year 2, when your child can confidently decode books fluently without being heavily reliant on sounding out, we carry out an assessment that gives your child a ZPD (Zone of Proximinal Development). Your child is then able to pick a book at their own level and read it at their own pace. When finished, your child takes a short quiz on the computer - the class teacher can use these results to help set targets and direct ongoing reading practice.
We use Blooms Taxonomy to provide additional challenge through questioning in our reading sessions and also carry out daily 1:1 reading for those that are not yet working at the level they should be.
Writing
Here at Rossmore we strive to deliver an exciting and engaging curriculum that inspires all children to want to write whilst also ensuring that children have the essential skills of spelling, punctuation, grammar and handwriting. We recognise the importance of children taking pride of their writing and being able to adapt for different purposes and audiences. This has all been considered when developing our long term plans to ensure that there is progression across the year groups. These long term writing plans have been adapted to ensure coverage of writing skills and objectives are carefully mapped out as well as on-going objectives we want to see in most pieces of writing.
For those children that find it difficult to write, we provide timely, additional intervention both in small groups and 1:1 to ensure that they make progress to close the gap. We also use technology to support those who have particular difficulties in order to remove the barrier of writing from them being able to access the wider curriculum. We support pupils with higher attainment by asking them to consider audience and purpose more deeply and draw on their wider reading experiences.
Vocabulary development is Interwoven through all areas of our curriculum. We want all children to become confident and fluent using new vocabulary in a wide range of contexts; including ‘multi-contextual’ and subject specific vocabulary. This will expand the vocabulary choices that are available to children when they write, and enable them to understand the meanings of words they meet in their reading across all subjects.
