English

English

Spoken Language

At our school, we believe that being able to listen carefully and respond in a thoughtful way is an important skill. It helps children not only in school but also in the world around them.

Every day, we use talk to help children learn. We teach them how to share their answers, ask questions, express their opinions, and describe things clearly. We also focus on helping children express their feelings in words. One important part of this is teaching new vocabulary to help all children grow in their learning.

We teach vocabulary in three ways:

• Tier 1 – These are words we use every day (like table, slowly, write, and horrible).
• Tier 2 – These are more sophisticated words you might find in books or schoolwork (like gregarious, beneficial, and required).
• Tier 3 – These are special words for certain subjects (like osmosis, trigonometry, and onomatopoeia).

We focus on teaching Tier 2 words to help children speak with more variety and write using rich, interesting vocabulary.

Our goal is for children to use English clearly and confidently, so they can communicate well with others. We also provide helpful sentence starters for each year group, which help children structure their thoughts when they ask questions or give answers.

We encourage children to talk and work together to help them understand and share their thinking. In the classroom, we use ‘Talk Partners’ to discuss ideas and loosely follow the principles of ‘Talk for Writing’ in Key Stage 1. We also make sure that our lessons include real-life activities, where children can practise speaking and adjusting their tone for different situations—whether it’s a presentation, a performance, a role play, or a debate. Talking is truly a key to success!

Phonics and Early Reading

At Primrose Hill C of E Primary Academy we are proud of our approach to reading, recognising its importance in opening up an exciting world of discovery.

Essential Letters and Sounds

Essential Letters and Sounds (ELS) is our chosen Phonics programme. The aim of ELS is ‘Getting all children to read well, quickly’. It teaches children to read by identifying the phonemes (the smallest unit of sound) and graphemes (the written version of the sound) within words and using these to read words.

Children begin learning Phonics at the very beginning of Reception and it is explicitly taught every day during a dedicated slot on the timetable. Children are given the knowledge and the skills to then apply this independently.

Throughout the day, children will use their growing Phonics knowledge to support them in other areas of the curriculum and will have many opportunities to practise their reading. This includes reading 1:1 with a member of staff, with a partner during paired reading and as a class.

Children continue daily Phonics lessons in Year 1 and further through the school to ensure all children become confident, fluent readers.

We follow the ELS progression and sequence. This allows our children to practise their existing phonic knowledge whilst building their understanding of the ‘code’ of our language GPCs (Grapheme Phoneme Correspondence). As a result, our children can tackle any unfamiliar words that they might discover.

Children experience the joy of books and language whilst rapidly acquiring the skills they need to become fluent independent readers and writers. ELS teaches relevant, useful and ambitious vocabulary to support each child’s journey to becoming fluent and independent readers.

We begin by teaching the single letter sounds before moving to diagraphs ‘sh’ (two letters spelling one sound), trigraphs ‘igh’ (three letters spelling one sound) and quadgraphs ‘eigh’ (four letters spelling one sound).

We teach children to:

• Decode (read) by identifying each sound within a word and blending them together to read fluently
• Encode (write) by segmenting each sound to write words accurately.

The structure of ELS lessons allows children to know what is coming next, what they need to do, and how to achieve success. This makes it easier for children to learn the GPCs we are teaching (the alphabetic code) and how to apply this when reading.

ELS is designed on the principle that children should ‘keep up’ rather than ‘catch up’. Since interventions are delivered within the lesson by the teacher, any child who is struggling with the new knowledge can be immediately targeted with appropriate support. Where further support is required, 1:1 interventions are used where needed. These interventions are short, specific and effective.

Supporting Reading at Home:

• Children will only read books that are entirely decodable, this means that they should be able to read these books as they already know the code contained within the book.
• We only use pure sounds when decoding words (no ‘uh’ after the sound)
• We want children to practise reading their book 4 times across the week working on these skills:

Decode – sounding out and blending to read the word.

Fluency – reading words with less obvious decoding.

Expression – using intonation and expression to bring the text to life!

We must use pure sounds when we are pronouncing the sounds and supporting children in reading words. If we mispronounce these sounds, we will make reading harder for our children. Please watch the videos below for how to accurately pronounce these sounds.

Phase 2 pronunciation 

Phase 3 pronunciation

Phase 5 pronunciation

Our Oxford University Press reading scheme supports the teaching of phonics by providing children with fully decodable reading books, linked to the Essential Letters and Sounds phases. When children are confident with the sounds in the phase, they move to phonetically plausible reading books and eventually to richer readers when they are secure in all phonic phases. Children remain on the reading scheme throughout their time at Primrose Hill and supplement their scheme book with a richer reading book from our well stocked library.

At the beginning of each academic year, we will hold an information session for parents and carers to find out more about what we do for Phonics, Reading and English at our schools. Please do join us.

More support and information about ELS can be found here.

A copy of our phonic milestones can be found here.

Learning to Read

At Primrose Hill we have a passion for reading from early reading until the children are ready for secondary school.

At our school, we believe that reading is a key part of learning, and we make sure children have plenty of opportunities to read throughout the day.

We start with activities like choral reading, echo reading, and partner reading, where students read together as a class. We also prioritise class novels, which are read aloud by expert readers. These novels are carefully chosen to challenge students, helping them learn new vocabulary and explore interesting themes.

In every term, our English lessons are focused around a core class text in Reception to Year 5, and fiction units in Year 6. This helps children connect with stories and deepen their understanding of different genres.

From Year 1 to Year 6, we have Whole Class Reading every day. This is done through a scheme called VIPERS. In VIPERS, we use a mix of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry texts—sometimes complete stories, and sometimes extracts. The goal is to make sure children understand what they read and develop good reading skills, like fluency and speed. Each reading lesson follows the VIPERS structure:

• Vocabulary – learning new words
• Infer – making guesses based on clues in the text
• Predict – thinking about what might happen next
• Explain – understanding why things happen in the story
• Retrieve – finding information directly in the text
• Summarise – sharing the main ideas of the text

We also make sure every child has a reading book and a reading record book to take home every day. We ask children to read at least four times a week and record it in their book. Rereading books helps them get better at understanding and enjoying stories.

Our school library is full of exciting books, and all students can borrow books whenever they want. Teachers can also use books from the library to support their lessons. We even offer newspapers for students to read! Our dedicated KS2 Reading Champions help run the library, organise fun reading events, book swaps, and fundraising activities to promote the joy of reading.

We also love to share our passion for books by having book displays, special reading corners, author visits, trips to the Cheltenham Literature Festival, and theatre performances based on stories. Each year, we enjoy going on a whole school trip to the pantomime.

Reading is an exciting adventure, and we make sure every child has the tools and support they need to become confident, passionate readers!

Writing

Children start making marks on paper at an early age and, from these early mark makers, we aim to develop confident and fluent writers. Across the school, children are encouraged to write for different purposes and we constantly look to develop their vocabulary and sentence structure skills. We explicitly teach grammar linked to each genre and give children opportunities to practise their grammar skills.  Teachers actively model writing to demonstrate writers choice to the children.

Spelling

As part of the National Curriculum, we help children learn how to spell a wide range of words throughout their time at school.

In Year 2, we use the Essential Spelling program, which builds on phonics to help children spell words correctly. This approach follows a clear, step-by-step progression, making spelling easier to learn.

In Year 3 and Year 4, we continue to develop spelling skills with the Essential Spelling and Word Knowledge scheme. This program focuses on both spelling rules and word meanings to help children become more confident spellers.

To support learning at home, there are many fun and free games available online or through app stores that can help children practice spelling. These can be a great way to practise together and make learning fun!

Reading Advice for Parents

The Importance of Reading

Evidence suggests that children who read for enjoyment every day not only perform better in reading tests than those who don’t, but also develop a broader vocabulary, increased general knowledge and a better understanding of other cultures.

Learning to read is about listening and understanding as well as working out print. Through hearing stories, children are exposed to a rich and wide vocabulary. This helps them build their own vocabulary and improve their understanding when they listen, which is vital as they start to read.

Reading for pleasure is more likely to determine whether a child does well at school than their social or economic background.

As children start to learn to read at school, you can play an important role in helping to keep them interested in books, finding out what interests them and helping them to find books that will be engaging and fun for them. Give time to help them practise reading the books they will bring home from school.

Research shows that reading with your child for as little as 10 minutes a day can significantly boost how well they do at school. Set aside a regular time every day to read with your child, whether it’s for 10 minutes when they get in from school or reading a bedtime story together. Little and often works best.

Explore different reading materials: as well as fiction there is a whole world of comics, magazines, ebooks, audio books and non-fiction for your child to discover.

Get the whole family involved: encourage your child to read with other family members, such as grandparents, brothers and sisters, and aunts and uncles.

Be positive: praise your child for trying hard at their reading and let them know it’s alright to make mistakes.

Be a reading role model: your child learns from you, so seeing you enjoying and valuing books can be a great inspiration!

10 top tips for parents to support children to read from the DfE