“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.” Dr Seuss.

• Reading is an important life skill, but more importantly it is a source of pleasure, another world in which children can explore, have adventures and discover new things. At Buxton Junior School, we love books and we want to instil this love of reading in our children, believing that reading encourages children to use their imagination – a book can take you anywhere you want to go! As well as helping children to develop their skills of inference, empathy and imagination, reading is just fun and we want our children to love books as much as we all do.
• Our English curriculum is taught through shared class texts. Over a period of weeks, we use this range of high quality shared texts to inspire our children as writers and read these books together in class, sharing ideas, questions and predictions. We think about how the characters feel and use this to inspire our writing. We may write a letter to somebody in a story, a newspaper report or a diary entry from the point of view of a main character. We may write our own versions of the stories we read or write a conversation between two characters. For example, Y5 have written balanced discussions about a dilemma faced by the cat, Varjak Paw, while Y3 have written imaginary stories about flying pigs based on the picture book Tuesday.  Y4 have written stories based on the video Language by Porter Robinson and Y6 have written letters in role as a character from Holes.
• We use discussion and drama to embed spoken language skills and develop children’s vocabulary; we value the importance of vocabulary so build in opportunities to study tier 2 and 3 words to enhance language development in all of our pupils.  We use the books which we read to notice how authors use grammar and punctuation for effect and we spot spelling patterns and word families, using our inference skills to work out the meaning of tricky words.
• We use short films, pictures, events from the news and our wonderful school grounds to inspire our children’s writing. By enthusing our children with a love of books, we are strengthening the foundations of their learning in all areas.
• We also enjoy studying poetry; learning and reciting poems by heart, while recognising and discussing different poetic forms.
• Pupils have access to fiction and non- fiction in our school library and we use published schemes such as Collins Big Cat and Oxford Reading Tree to ensure that pupils are reading appropriate texts matched to their ability and level of need.
• For those pupils who need additional phonics support we follow Little Wandle (Letters and Sounds revised) which is a systematic and synthetic phonics programme that is also used by our main feeder infant school. During phonics sessions, pupils are taught to apply their phonetic knowledge through a range of reading and writing opportunities.
• All pupils at Buxton Junior School access fluency sessions (a minimum of 3x per week). Our fluency sessions are delivered with a focus of reading words automatically, accurately and with appropriate intonation.
• We recognise and celebrate the importance of reading for pleasure at our school. Within each class there is a daily opportunity to read their own books and listen to the class book.  We select our class books carefully, fostering children’s interests and curiosities. Teachers ensure that pupils are exposed to a range of books and authors to expand cultural capital. All classes visit our school library on a weekly basis to share books and explore books that are closely linked to their learning.

This YouTube video will help your child with pronunciation of the letters.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5J2Ddf_0Om8