We've got a range of different support schemes available.

• Little Wandle decodable books and Rising Stars reading scheme.
• Spelling shed for teaching spelling in Y2-Y6.
• Basic skills curriculum
• Letter-Join: supporting the teaching of handwriting skills.

Nursery and Reception children work with various activities that improve their fine motor control (their ability to control the small muscles in their hands). These activities range from tasks that require the children to use tools such as tweezers to move objects to a more complex tracing of patterns.

From reception to year 6, we form letters similarly. Using a cursive font, we ensure our handwriting style is consistently used in lesson resources. This cohesive approach reinforces our handwriting policy throughout our curriculum.

Reception starts with cursive-style handwriting that's unjoined. Their letters start and end with a cursive flick. Moving up to year 1, these letters are joined, using the familiar letters as a starting point, and continued to year 6.

Handwriting is taught for 50 minutes, split into smaller sessions throughout the week.

Throughout school, we use the Little Wandle teaching method.

We plan and deliver phonics using the four teaching stages of learning:

Early years and KS1 participate daily in discrete, whole-class phonics sessions. These follow a defined teaching sequence of phonemes. Children who fall behind in their phonics are provided with catch-up sessions and their whole class session.

For children who join us, we initially assess their phonic decoding ability. Once children grasp decoding, we focus on using phonics in writing, such as spelling.

Each June, all children in Year 1 undertake a National Phonics Screening Check. This check consists of 40 words (20 actual words and 20 pseudowords), which all children will be asked to read. This check focuses on seeing if pupils can decode a range of words they have not seen before.

At Co-op Academy Brownhill, we place reading at the heart of everything we do. Children are exposed to high-quality texts through their writing sessions, whole class reading sessions and storytime.

In EYFS and Year 1, children focus on books they explore in their English lessons. They follow the Little Wandle Reading lessons to support their phonics development.

• Application of phonics to reading – Little Wandle

From Year 2 to Year 6, children have class books that they focus on each half-term. They follow a structured whole-class reading model to teach reading comprehension explicitly. All children have four reading sessions of 30 minutes throughout the week.

KS1 Whole Class Reading Structure –

KS2 Whole Class Reading Structure –

Children across the school enjoy storytime for 15 minutes daily. Our storytime reading Spine is mapped to ensure children are exposed to various high-quality texts from various genres and authors.

Reading Spine – story time.pdf

Co-op Academy Brownhill's Reading Shed

We have our own mini-library in the Key Stage Two playground, next to the hall door. Everyone in the school is welcome to use books in the Reading Shed.

Creative Writing

Working together, we decode these exciting stories. We look at the language used and the meaning of words. Our children are engrossed in these beautiful stories, which they then imitate in the style of that author in their own creative writing.

Assessment Exemplifications

Keeping up with the needs of our children, we're constantly evaluating. We use examples from the government (KS1 Writing Exemplification and KS2 Writing Exemplification) that illustrate what being' at the expected standard' would look like at the end of KS1 and the end of KS2. In response to these, KS1 focuses on character descriptions, narratives, fairy tales and recounts to get children interested in writing. In key stage 2, there is still a significant focus on narrative and story writing, such as horror, suspense and fables, whilst also developing grammatical structures further, such as paragraphs. We also develop skills in debating, persuasion, and autobiography.