English
Mrs C Aspinall and Mrs N Ward are the subject leads for English at Cottam.
At Cottam Primary School, through our teaching of English, we strive for our children to become articulate and imaginative learners. We want our children to discuss, debate, support, challenge and build using their spoken language clearly and their listening skills keenly. We want our children to love reading and to do it with ease, fluency and understanding for pleasure and to widen their understanding of the world. We want our children to enjoy words using language to its full when writing for a whole variety of purposes and audiences making themselves understood and entertaining others.
English Policies
English Curriculum
An outline of the genres and texts taught across Cottam Primary School
Reading
Reading at Cottam Primary
We use a variety of reading schemes to ensure breadth and depth in the early stages of reading. These texts are all decodable by the children at their reading level. Our schemes include The Oxford Reading Tree, Collins and Heinemann before a wide range of popular fiction is available for fluent readers. Our children are informally assessed on a regular basis to ensure that they are reading at the right level. They should be able to read the levelled books sent home to an adult with confidence and should be able to discuss the content of the book, making predictions, discussing characters and asking questions about what they have read.
Books of a higher level are used within Guided Reading sessions in school to teach specific reading skills. It is important that our children have exposure to a wide variety of genres so our reading texts are supplemented by a selection of other reading material including poems, non-fiction texts and extracts.
All classes have a weekly trip to the school library where they are encouraged to choose from a wide selection of books for topics, authors and genres that interest them. These books are intended to be shared with others in order to encourage our children to develop a love of reading and a curiosity in the world around them.
In class, our children regularly use dictionaries, thesauruses and a wide range of information books, both as hard copies and online, throughout the curriculum subjects and increasingly as they progress through school.
In addition to this stories, non-fiction and poetry are regularly read to the children.
Recommended Reads
Best Books for Each Year Group
Each of the Year Group Recommended Reads lists contains 50 books specially picked out for reading for pleasure in each primary year group, from Preschool to Year 6.
The lists are designed to provide recommendations of age-appropriate and accessible books across a range of genres and styles and are purely selected for the purpose of reading for pleasure at each age group.
Each list contains a balance across different genres and styles. Some children naturally navigate towards non-fiction, while others find graphic novels or poetry the most enjoyable forms to pick up and read. Each list contains a balance of age-appropriate fiction, picturebooks, non-fiction, poetry and graphic novels, with a handful of novelty or tactile books added in too. The lists aim to cater for different reading styles, interest levels, publication dates (you’ll find some true golden oldies as well as brand new titles on each list) and also books that contain a diversity of characters and settings.
Reading at Home
Take a few moments to flick through our guidance for supporting our KS2 children with their reading at home.
Follow these links to find useful information on encouraging children to read, supporting home learning and some of the best reads for different age groups.
Tips for reading with your child | BookTrust
100 best books for children | BookTrust
Phonics
Phonic Pronunciation
Correct Phonic Pronunciation
Phonics Terminology
Phonic Screening Check
Phonics Screening Check
The Year 1 phonics screening check is not a formal test, but a way for teachers to ensure that children are making sufficient progress with their phonics skills to read words and that they are on track to become fluent readers who can enjoy reading for pleasure and for learning.
We already have detailed assessments of your child's phonics ability so this will not tell us anything new but is a check to ensure that your child is working at a nationally agreed age appropriate standard.
The phonics screening check for current year 1's will take place June 2025.
What is the Phonics Screening Check | A Guide for Parents
What is the Phonics Screening Check? A Guide for Parents The phonics screening check or phonics screening test is a statutory check which was introduced by the government in 2012 and administered to children in Year 1 towards the end of the summer term.
Phonic Screening Check
Phonics Screening Check
The Year 1 phonics screening check is not a formal test, but a way for teachers to ensure that children are making sufficient progress with their phonics skills to read words and that they are on track to become fluent readers who can enjoy reading for pleasure and for learning.
We already have detailed assessments of your child's phonics ability so this will not tell us anything new but is a check to ensure that your child is working at a nationally agreed age appropriate standard.
The phonics screening check for current year 1's will take place June 2025
.
What is the Phonics Screening Check | A Guide for Parents
What is the Phonics Screening Check? A Guide for Parents The phonics screening check or phonics screening test is a statutory check which was introduced by the government in 2012 and administered to children in Year 1 towards the end of the summer term.
How to help at home
Phonics and Early Reading Homework Presentation
Phonics
At Cottam Primary, phonics is taught daily to all children across Early Years and Key Stage One (and for those children who require continuity of Phonics provision in Key Stage 2). We follow the Lancashire Red Rose Letters and Sounds systematic, synthetic phonics planning programme.
What is phonics?
Phonics is a way of teaching children to read quickly and skilfully. They are taught how to:
recognise the sounds that individual letters make
identify the sounds that different combinations of letters make-such as 'sh' or 'oo'
blend these sounds together from left to right to make a word
Children can then use this knowledge to 'decode' new words that they hear or see. This is the first important step in learning to read.
The children are taught to read words by blending, which means pushing all the sounds together to make a word. The children are taught to spell words by segmenting, which means sounding out words and writing down the sounds they can hear.
By the end of Reception children are expected to be secure in Phase Three. By the end of Year One children are expected to be secure in Phase Five. When finishing Key Stage One, most children at Cottam will have progressed from exploring letters and sounds to exploring spelling rules and patterns.
Why phonics?
Research shows that when phonics is taught in a structured way-starting with the easiest sounds and progressing to the most complex-it is the most effective way of teaching young children to read. It is particularly helpful for children aged 5 to 7 years old. Almost all children who receive good teaching of phonics will learn the skills that they need to tackle new words. Children can go on to read any kind of text fluently and confidently, and read for enjoyment (Department for Education).
Phonics Phases
The children are taught in smaller groups organised by their Phonic phase.
They are assessed informally throughout the year to ensure they are secure in their phase before moving on.
Phase One
Supports the importance of speaking and listening and develops children’s discrimination of sounds, including letter sounds.
Phase Two
The children learn to pronounce the sounds themselves in response to letters, before blending them. This leads to them being able to read simple words and captions.
Letters: s, a, t, p, i, n, m, d, g, o, c, k, ck, e, u, r, h, b, f, ff, l, ll, ss
Tricky Words: the, to, I, no, go
Phase Three
Completes the teaching of the alphabet and moves on to sounds represented by more than one letter. The children will learn letter names and how to read and spell some tricky words.
Letters: j, v, w, x, y, z, zz, qu, ch, sh, th, ng, ai, ee, igh, oa, oo, ar, or, ur, ow, oi, ear, air, ure, er
Tricky Words: he, she, we, me, be, was, my, you, they, her, all, are
Phase Four
The children learn to read and spell words containing adjacent consonants.
Tricky Words: said, so, have, like, some, come, were, there, little, one, do, when, out, what
Phase Five
The children broaden their knowledge of sounds for use in reading and spelling. They will begin to build word-specific knowledge of the spellings of words.
Sounds: ay, ou, ie, ea, oy, ir, ue, aw, wh, ph, ew, oe, au, ey, a_e, i_e, u_e, o_e
Tricky Words: oh, their, people, Mr, Mrs, looked, called, asked
What strategies can children use to help with blending and segmenting?
Blending Words to Read
At Cottam we teach children to draw and press 'sound buttons'.
A small dot is used for a grapheme and a longer line is used to represent the diagraph or trigraph.
Blending Polysyllabic Words
When reading words with more than one syllable, children are taught to draw sound buttons before breaking the word up into syllables. They are encouraged to then build and blend the first syllable then the second syllable before combing the two parts to read the word.
Reading a sentence
When reading sentences, children sound out unfamiliar words using the strategies taught during phonic sessions. Once a word has been sounded out, children are encouraged to return to the beginning of the sentence and reread it to ensure they understand what has been read.
Reading a Sentence
Uploaded by Cottam Primary on 2024-04-29.
Segmenting Words
At Cottam we teach the children to use 'phonic fingers' to support their segmenting skills. Children are encouraged to 'tap' a single finger onto their chin to represent the first phoneme heard in the word. They then 'tap' a second finger on their chin for the next phoneme and so on before saying the complete word and 'swiping' all fingers across their chin whilst saying the complete word.
Segmenting Words
Uploaded by Cottam Primary on 2024-04-29.
Segmenting Polysyllabic Words
When writing words with more than one syllable children are taught to first break the word up into each syllable. They segment the first syllable using phonic fingers, record the phonemes down before segmenting the second syllable in the same way.
Segmenting Polysyllabic Words
Spelling
The importance of spelling is not underestimated at Cottam Primary. Learning to spell helps with your child's reading as they build and rely on the same mental imagery. Spellings are a great way to improve and extend our vocabulary, helping us to further understand the words that we read and new words we meet. Strong spelling helps lessen the stresses of writing, freeing children up to use their imaginations more. So, as well as learning to spell new words, we take time to learn what they mean and strive to use them within our writing.
Learning Spellings at Home
Please take a few moments to flick through these ideas for helping your children with their spellings at home. We explain our approach to spellings in Key Stage 2 and include a separate list of spelling strategies for your further support.
Statutory Spellings by Year Group
Here are the statutory spellings - ones given within the 2014 National Curriculum - that each Key Stage 2 year group has to learn. These will be covered across the year along with a range of spellings to help develop the children's use of spelling rules, prefixes and suffixes.
Handwriting
Handwriting at Cottam Primary School focuses on the process of joined-up cursive letter formation. We use an online resource called Letter-join. This is a resource for teaching cursive handwriting at school and at home. It uses interactive animations to demonstrate joined-up letter formation.
Look through the document below to see examples of how our handwriting develops across Cottam Primary.
English Gallery
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