Phonics
At Gledhow, Nursery to Year 2 students have regular phonics sessions using the Little Wandle phonics scheme. They learn new phonemes and graphemes, practising with matching games and writing.
Nursery focuses on learning phonics through rhymes, songs, instruments, and listening games.
Reception starts the next phase, whilst revisiting some important practices from nursery, learning phonemes and graphemes, and developing reading and writing skills.
Year 1 continues this journey, providing children with the key skills to become confident and fluent readers.
In Year 2 and once children are secure in their phonics, we teach them the foundations to become confident in their spelling.
Alongside phonics lessons, children partake in group reading sessions 3 times a week. This builds their decoding skills, fluency, prosody and comprehension skills. Children will be expected to take home a decodable book each week that aligns with their phonics learning in class.
Reading
Once children have completed their learning through the Little Wandle phonics programme (usually in the Autumn term of Year 2), they will begin our bespoke Reciprocal Reading sessions. They work through a sequence of skills to support comprehension, including predicting, clarifying, questioning and summarising. They share their thoughts as a class and comprehension is monitored through verbal conversions and carefully planned activities to complete in their reading journals.
Texts are carefully selected to promote a love and enjoyment of reading. We provide children with ‘mirrors and windows’ ensuring that the books they read not only reflect themselves, but open up doors to other cultures and the world around them.
Once a week, all children from EYFS to Year 6, attend our beautiful and well-resourced school library. They are encouraged to take a book home of their choosing. This session also allows teachers and peers to discuss their favourite genres and authors, recommending books to others and sharing stories.
All children will have a book to read at home. Whilst children are on the Little Wandle phonics programme, this book will be decodable. They will also take a ‘sharing’ book from the library. From Year 2, we expect children to chose an age appropriate and challenging book from our library or class book corner.
Handwriting
At Gledhow, we teach Debbie Hepplewhite's handwriting style, which emphasizes fluent lines of properly oriented letters from Foundation to Key Stage 1.
Foundation Stage focuses on mark-making with various materials, progressing fine-motor skills for comfortable pencil grips and correct letter formation.
By Year 2, children begin using joined handwriting and continue to develop these skills throughout Key Stage 2 with regular whole class or small group practice.
Writing
Gledhow's English lessons use the Writing Rainbow approach, breaking down learning into reading, analysing, practicing, planning, writing, editing and publishing. Texts are diverse and engaging, selected by teachers to increase motivation and desire to write. Published outcomes are linked to the text studied and encourage the application of taught grammatical concepts.
Spelling, Punctuation & Grammar
Children learn age-appropriate spellings weekly as part of homework and taught explicitly in school. Year 1 links spelling to phonics, and in KS2, the EdShed Spelling Scheme is followed. English lessons teach grammar and punctuation, relating to class texts where possible. Writing opportunities are given to apply spelling, punctuation and grammar skills, with celebration through editing and publishing.