At BSC, we recognise the fundamental importance of change if we are to continue driving School improvement and ensure that the children are maximising their learning potential. One of the things that I am really passionate about is ensuring that we inspire a love of reading in children: reading is the one element of learning that opens doors to absolutely everything.
Pie Corbett sums this up brilliantly, “ We need to develop greedy readers and then turn them into writers who are attuned to the daily possibility of learning how to write from their reading – the curiosity of a fellow writer. “
This week, I had the pleasure of working with parents from across the Junior School in a workshop about how we have shifted our approach to the teaching of English in the Junior School. We have now adopted a book-based approach to teach all elements of the English curriculum. This not only encourages the love of reading in your children that is so fundamental to their success in school but also ensures that the curriculum has greater purpose and meaning. This is of paramount importance, especially when it comes to writing: everything makes so much more sense to children when they have real context and purpose. There is much more information about this included in the Power Point I sent out.
Our Planning Process
1.We start by choosing a book that will engage and inspire your children. The book drives the learning.
2.We use formative assessment to decide which grammar and reading learning objectives, from the English National Curriculum, to plan and then teach.
3.The decisions about these objectives then inform the genres the children do.
This planning process ensures both engagement and challenge because our starting point is to look at what the children actually need rather than just the genre.
The Book: The Man Who Walked Between the Towers
This half term, Years 1-6 are all being inspired by the same amazing book. There are a number of reasons why we chose to do this:
- It is an inspiring story and one very well linked to our work in school on developing Growth Mindset. It is important that children make connections across the curriculum and this book makes that easy.
- Working on the same book forces accurate differentiation across the year groups.
- It is a great book for teaching a wide range of grammar and reading objectives.
During the workshop, parents enjoyed working through some of the grammar and reading activities that the teachers have planned for the children and they had a go at guessing which activity belonged to each year group. These are all on the Power Point to help illustrate how much learning every year group can gain from this one book.
I cannot stress enough how important it is to get your children reading and developing a real love for books. Parents attending the workshop were really interested in having a book list to help support this at home. There is a link below to a website that has a very coherent list of books for every year group.
Through the activities we tried in the workshop, we also talked a lot about grammar and many parents were interested in the expectation at each key stage. Today, along with the Power Point from this workshop, I sent home the list of learning objectives for English in an email to all families. There are also links below to the grammar tests that children are expected to sit (in the UK) at the end of Year 2 and Year 6. Our PTE tests are linked to the objectives covered in these tests.
https://schoolreadinglist.co.uk/
Should you have any questions or queries regarding any of the above please do come and speak to me: my door is open as always. I would also be more than happy to re-run the workshops from this week if there is enough interest. Please tell Ms Tishani before the end of next week (Friday 18th January) if you would like me to do this.
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