Intent

At Bakewell Infants, we intend to ensure that all children leave us as confident, competent readers and writers. We want our children to develop a love of language and literature alongside the skills required to continue to access both enjoyable and challenging texts from around the world and write beautifully and technically for a range of purposes. We believe that English is at the centre of education, therefore our whole school curriculum, and all of our topic-based learning, is based around the enjoyment of high quality, engaging and exciting texts. 

Implementation

Reading

The school teaches reading using a planned curriculum that has been carefully targeted to guarantee that every child makes excellent progress by experiencing a wide breadth of quality texts throughout their primary education and receiving regular opportunities and experiences to help them develop a joy of reading.

Writing

The school teaches writing as a cumulative and systematic process this ensures children make faster progress and gain confidence and pleasure as a writer. It is grounded in the process of shared writing with lots of opportunities for collaborative and supportive writing.

Talk for Writing

The school uses Talk for Writing. This approach is based on deepening our understanding of language development. Over time, children gradually build their bank of well-known texts and text-type features, supplemented by picture books, novels, poems and non-fiction books. Gradually, this living library of language begins to equip the children with the words they need to express themselves. In the same way, the ability to manipulate a bank of texts increasingly skilfully enables children to independently create new versions. Each writing genre is taught through a three part process - 'Imitate', 'Innovate' and 'Independent' application.

Handwriting

Our school and Bakewell Junior school uses the following letter formation.

                                         Click the link to watch different ways of practising your spellings.                         

Phonics

Our phonic curriculum includes carefully planned and targeted sequenced phonics lessons. These lessons focus on the building and progression of skills from Reception to Y1. The skills then provide the foundations to early reading and spelling.

At Bakewell Infants, phonics is taught through a systematic synthetic approach driven by our 'Little Wandle' scheme of work. All children within the Early Years Foundation stage and Year 1 have a daily 20-25 minute lesson of phonics teaching to enable them to read and spell words for themselves.

The children's early reading is further supported by Big Cat Phonics books which directly link to their phonic knowledge. This allows for further consolidation and embedding of new phonic knowledge resulting in children making rapid progress in reading.  Children read books that they are 90% fluent with and have already had all the sounds taught to them.

Little Wandle Parent Support

The resources on this page will help you support your child with saying their sounds and writing their letters. There are also some useful videos so you can see how they are taught at school and feel confident about supporting their reading at home. Click here.

You can find the full National Curriculum programmes of study for English at Key Stage 1 by clicking here.

Impact

In Reading, we ensure children leave us as confident, competent readers. We ensure children to develop a love of language and literature alongside the skills required to continue to access both enjoyable and challenging texts.

In Writing, we ensure children develop a deep understanding of writing any genre or text type.