English

At Engage Academy, we want every child to be a successful and passionate reader. We believe reading is key to future academic success and is firmly embedded in all areas of our curriculum. Our approach is bespoke to the children we teach and appropriately meets their needs. By the time they leave Engage Academy, our students have re-engaged with their reading journey, made progress from their unique starting points and have developed a love of reading. We aim for our children to be fluent, confident and passionate readers. Every child reads, or is read to, every day.

Reading is embedded into our curriculum. Each class has a dedicated story time each day, where a story is shared. These can range from high-quality picture books to short chapter books to more complex class novels. Adults choose these stories based on children’s interests, links to the wider learning and the development of literacy skills, including developing vocabulary. Incidental reading happens across the school and is a key feature in most lessons, such as following a recipe in food technology. A love of reading is promoted through weekly library sessions with the head teacher, key worker sessions with parents, book bags and whole school celebration days such as World Book Day.

Reading at Engage can be broken down into two strands, including early reading and phonics. Pupils who are beyond phonics are taught reading through a comprehension driven approach.

All pupils are assessed on arrival using the Ruth Miskin scheme Read, Write, Inc assessment. They are then grouped accordingly and access RWI either in small groups or on a 1-1 basis to develop early reading and writing skills. Daily lessons are split into speed sound sessions and story book sessions. In the speed sound sessions, pupils learn new sounds and practise previously taught sounds. Pupils use “Fred Talk” to blend and read words. Pupils are taught to form letter correctly and segment words to spell accurately before learning to hold a sentenced in their head to write it. Pupils will progress through set 1, set 2 and alternative set 3 sounds.

Each RWI speed sound session comprises:

• reviewing known sounds,
• introducing new sound (depending on the learner, this can be a new sound daily or every two days to ensure it is firmly embedded in their working memory)
• reading green words (3 times – Fred Talk, Fred in their Head, Speedy Read)
• writing green words
• storybook session

See the appendix to see the order of sounds and irregular words.  

During the story book sessions, pupils read a book closely matched to their phonic knowledge. Pupils will re-read the story to build fluency, accuracy and understanding. When pupils have a good understanding of the story, pupils will answer questions about what they have read. Read Write Inc books offer a range of fiction and non-fiction.

Children who are secure in their phonic knowledge are taught reading through either 1-1 reading sessions or whole class guided reading sessions. Pupils may be working on a range of skills, from improving fluency to developing their inference skills. Children who need one-to-one sessions will read alongside an adult and answer questions throughout, building up to written responses. Sessions are personalised to the child, based on the skills they are practising, the level of book they are reading, their resilience to learning and concentration time.

Children who are accessing whole class guided reading sessions follow VIPERS. VIPERS are the key areas we feel our children need to know and understand in order to improve their comprehension of a text. VIPERS stand for vocabulary, inference, prediction, explanation, retrieval, and sequence/summarise. This method of teaching reading ensures adults ask and students are familiar with a range of questions.

During the reading session, an adult will read an extract to the children, with opportunities created for children to join in. This allows all children in the class to access a text that may be above what they could read independently. The teacher models reading aloud, finding information and writing answers before children practise independently. Any children identified as needing additional support in this group will access further 1-1 reading in addition to whole class activities.

Some writing sessions will be linked to high-quality reading books using the Power of Reading scheme of learning, providing a further opportunity for children to unpick and enjoy a text.

At Engage Academy, we believe writing is a key skill for life, both inside and outside education. We aim to provide children with transferable writing skills that can be used successfully within lessons at Engage and at their next educational setting. Children arrive at Engage at very different starting points in their writing journey. However, by the time they leave, we want all children to be confident writers who will ‘have a go’, to be coherent in their writing, and increasingly accurate in their spelling and transcription.

Pupils access daily writing lessons which are planned to meet the requirements of the National Curriculum and cover different genres including narratives, instructions and non-chronological reports. Pupils have regular opportunities to write for various purposes, access new learning and practise key skills. Children may be working on explicit cognition and learning targets from their EHCPs or support plans, or individual/whole class writing targets identified by their teacher.

Teachers have a wide range of schemes to support their writing teaching and learning, including Power of Reading and Literacy Shed. Staff have the confidence and skill to adapt these to meet the complex needs of our young people. Units of work are chosen based on their links to the wider learning and the interests of pupils, and are driven by high-quality texts and media.

Pupil access a 15 minute daily handwriting lesson which follows the ISHA approach.  This structured way of teaching handwriting is proven to develop pupils’ sense of pride and self esteem which in turn supports improvement in their writing and academic progress.