English

English

Here at Highfield we aim to instil a love of reading and writing from an early age. We do this by encouraging a love of reading for pleasure and by giving our children a belief that anyone can be a great writer!

Reading begins with a good knowledge of phonics and our skilled early years team support this with engaging activities each day. Our school follows the Letters and Sounds scheme which aims to build children's speaking and listening skills through a systematic programme with the goal of them becoming fluent readers by age seven.

In daily Guided Reading lessons, we use a range of high-quality texts to teach our readers how to retrieve information and to find the deeper meaning within the words. The children learn to ‘speed read’ to find words and phrases and are coached to give evidence to support the answers they give.

Becoming a confident writer is an essential life skill and at Highfield we pride ourselves on planning a teaching units of work which captivate the children, immerse them in the writing style and develop a useful toolkit of grammar and punctuation types.

Each class is taught spelling rules which progress in difficulty from Reception to Year 6 and, through a range of activities, they become familiar with the spelling pattern. During these sessions we also practise our handwriting to develop the correct joins and a fluent style at speed.