Literacy

Reading

At Torridon Primary school we aim to develop a love of reading and encourage every child to read with a grown up at home every night. Children who read with their families grow in confidence much more quickly and develop a love of reading that can last a lifetime. This is one of the most powerful ways of enabling children to progress in all areas of their learning.

Phonics

At Torridon Primary School, we follow the Department for Education programme  ‘Letters and Sounds’ for our phonics teaching.    https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/190599/Letters_and_Sounds_-_DFES-00281-2007.pdf

This starts with early Phase 1 and 2 phonics in Nursery and is built upon throughout Reception into Years 1 & 2 and also into lower KS2.

Children have a daily phonics session which introduces them to the ‘phoneme’ (letter sound) and the matching ‘grapheme’ (how this is represented in written form).

We use a wide range of exciting games and engaging resources to enthuse our children and support them with their learning, as well as using key websites including PhonicsPlay    https://www.phonicsplay.co.uk/.

Children are given opportunities to apply their learning of these phonemes independently throughout the day and some children will also receive additional small group support to help build on their phonics knowledge. As children progress into Year 2, they are also introduced to spelling rules as part of their phonics learning, examples of this include suffixes, prefixes, plurals and past tense.

Daily phonics lessons take place in The Early Years Foundation Stage and Key Stage One which enable our children to recognise the sounds and decode and blend words. The children then progress to develop their understanding of what they are reading as they move from Key Stage One to Key Stage Two.

Writing

Throughout each key stage, children take part in exciting opportunities to develop their writing skills. School trips, theatre visits and author workshops provide rich experiences for the children to draw on. A broad range of quality texts, read in class, enable the children to experience different genres of writing, including diaries, book reviews, stories, fact files, comic strips and newspaper reports. There is also a focus on developing grammar, punctuation and spelling skills.