Literacy Curriculum Changes
We are excited to announce to parents that we are beginning the journey to rewrite and revitalise our literacy curriculum, from Year 2 - Year 6. This will be a gradual process which will take place over the next academic year.
We want to continue to ensure that our children have world-class writing and reading teaching so we have spent time looking for the best frameworks for teaching literacy that are supported by the most up-to-date educational research.
In the new academic year, we are going to split our Literacy lessons into two separate lessons of ‘Reading’ and ‘Writing’ to help pupils and teachers understand that the skills are distinctly different and to ensure that our teachers are able support pupils to reach an even higher standard. This will mean that teachers will be able to focus on each skill separately and ensure that teaching time is split evenly between reading and writing skills.
For reading, we will use whole books for teaching and these lessons will be based on a Framework called ‘Take One Book’ and bring insome elements from our current ‘Class Reader’ approach which we have used for the last few years to supplement our current scheme (Literacy and Language). We know that this book-based approach to teaching reading will ensure that our pupils read more and understand more. This will happen alongside our continual focus on ensuring that all of our pupils leave Elmhurst with a love of reading!
Zaina in 6V on the Take One Book Lessons she has been taught so far: ‘It’s a great challenge for children. They will get to build their knowledge with actual books rather than the anthologies we’ve been using so far. Children will be reading much more.’
For writing, we will use an approach called ‘Writing for pleasure’ which ensures that children have much more independence in their writing but are taught new skills in every single lesson. Lessons will follow the same structure each day, and teaching will be in bitesize chunks which is similar to the
mastery approach in Maths. In these lessons, children will have 30 minutes to write every day. This means that they will get even more practice with writing than they do currently - and research shows that the more you write, the better you will get at it!
A pupil now in Year 7 on the Writing for Pleasure lessons last term: ‘I feel like my freedom in writing has been unleashed! I can really access true creativity and apply it to my writing. My class’ writing is more original and they are more enthusiastic about writing.’
Our phonics teaching provision in Nursery to Year 1 will not change, but we will ensure that we bring the best bits of what we learn from our new curriculum in Year 2 - 6 into the Early Years and Year 1.
