Burnt Oak Junior School

Children at Burnt Oak Junior School are creative and imaginative writers.  They will have many opportunities throughout the week to write, edit and improve. We follow CUSP reading, writing and spelling programmes. https://www.unity-curriculum.co.uk/more-information/primary/#reading&writing

We teach the full National Curriculum for English. The skills that children are taught in Literacy underpin all other subjects.  They enable pupils to communicate and express themselves in all areas of their work.  Teachers will always make cross-curricular links wherever appropriate and will plan for pupils to apply the skills, knowledge and understanding that they have acquired during Literacy to other areas of the curriculum.

At Burnt Oak Junior School, we believe that reading is central to a child’s understanding of the school curriculum and is of vital importance in life. We will develop a love and appreciation of reading which will stay with children for life. We will use good reading materials and resources to provide a breadth and range of reading material in school.

Foundation and Key Stage 1 classes at Chatsworth Infant School enjoy and participate in story time sessions reguarly.  Teachers in Key Stage 2 regularly share a range of narrative and non-narrative texts with the whole class.

Each class has a book corner.   As part of home reading, children should be selecting and reading a book appropriate to their level.  We encourage parents/carers to hear their child read unless they are at a level where the pupils can assess their own reading.  Feedback on home reading is made by parents/carers or pupils within the Home Reading Records.

Whole Class CUSP reading sessions take place for 30 minutes each day.  Children who require additional support with reading normally receive more regular opportunities with another adult. 

At Chatsworth and Burnt Oak,  we understand the relationship between the sounds of spoken language, and the letters and graphemes of written language. We use phonics as the first strategy to help children learn to read. We learn that phonemes are ‘a sound’ and that graphemes are ‘a sound written down’. We follow the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds programme to learn to blend sounds together to say, read and write new and unfamiliar words with confidence. Please click here to access the parents page of the website: https://www.littlewandlelettersandsounds.org.uk/resources/for-parents/

Intervention groups are set up for those children struggling with their phonics learning and this additional support continues from Chatsworth Infant School, with small group or one to one sessions.  In addition, we have access to The Pioneer Lead Academy Teacher who is a phonics specialist.

A good spelling programme gradually builds pupils’ spelling vocabulary therefore, when children enter Key Stage 2 they will have daily CUSP spelling lessons.

In Year 6 children are required to take a 'Spelling, Punctuation and Grammar’ test. We endeavour to prepare children for this test as early as possible and therefore make spelling and grammar a key priority in all curriculum areas.