Welcome

Literacy

At Whittington we actively encourage children to achieve in their skills and abilities to become good writers and readers.

Reading

At Whittington a variety of approaches are used to teach children to read for enjoyment and information. An emphasis is placed on developing fluency, accuracy, understanding and confidence when reading.

A wealth and variety of literature is available for children to read in school to develop their understanding and enjoyment of books and to enable them to become reflective readers and attentive listeners.

Children have the opportunity to read and be read to regularly by the teacher during shared and guided reading sessions within and outside the Literacy Hour.

They are encouraged to take books home to share and read with parents on a regular basis.

Skills involved in reading are specifically taught and practised through a variety of challenging texts during shared, guided and independent reading and writing sessions within the literacy hour.

Children are taught reading strategies through Guided Reading sessions. This is done by the teacher reading with a small group of children and showing how to apply reading strategies and focussing on expressive reading and child's comprehension skills, of deduction and inference. We are extremely lucky at Whittington that our PTA has kindly donated half the money required to fund our brand new reading scheme. We are very grateful for this kind gift.

In Key stage 1 children have a home reader to practice key words and reading strategies taught in class. In Key stage two children also have this practice with the emphasis changing to more reading independence as they progress through school.

We are fortunate at Whittington to have an extensive fiction library where children are encouraged to read for pleasure. Every child in the school has access to a school library book as well as using the interschool library service, which provides the school with non-fiction topic books. We are hoping to improve our library by having an Y5/6 working party and school librarians.

Writing

At Whittington we strive to show children there is a purpose for and many forms of writing. We enjoy making writing fun. We see that there is a strong link between the written word and spoken voice so we encourage drama and speaking and listening activities to stimulate work.

We have a good selection of interesting and stimulating texts to engage our children to write.

Children are taught skills to enable them to become independent and competent writers.

They are taught about the different features, structures and conventions of friction and non-fiction texts.

Children are stimulated to write in a variety of purposeful and meaningful forms.

Children regularly plan, review and redraft their work with the support of the teacher.

As children progress through the school they are encouraged to develop a widening vocabulary and increasing ability to spell accurately.

The children work in ability groups across the school to help everyone achieve their potential. We set targets when working on units of work called WILFs (What I Looking For) where children are conscious of the learning they are undertaking. This allows the children to have success criteria and to understand what they need to do in order to be successful.

Every term children are assessed in their writing through the STAR BOOK where we record their achievements during that snapshot of time and targets are given to the children and relayed to parents every term. This reporting to parents is a new initiative and we hope it will be beneficial to parents and children. Looking around school you can see the vocabulary and punctuation prompts, which help our writers develop their skills.

Within speaking and Listening at Whittington, the children are encouraged and given the opportunity to express themselves clearly and confidently. They are made aware of the importance of listening to others as a sign of respect and to acquire information.

There are many improvements and initiatives going on behind the scenes to help raise Literacy standards at Whittington and to help every child progress and reach their potential.