English

We are passionate about reading at Cockington Primary School. We believe that reading is a passport to the world and therefore every child deserves the chance to become a reader.We want children to love reading as much as we do; reading for pleasure is prioritised and at the heart of our curriculum. Time is organised to support all children to become confident, keen and capable readers so that they are able to access the entire curriculum.

Reading for pleasure

Almost all books within our school have been carefully selected to ensure children are exposed to a range of high-quality texts that match their age and interests; we encourage children to browse literature and build preferences.

Reading Aloud

Reading aloud to children allows us to widen knowledge of texts and authors, build stamina for listening and explore challenging vocabulary and themes. ‘Story time’ in class is a wonderful chance for the teacher to unlock children’s imaginations and demonstrate all the reading skills that we work so hard to teach throughout the week. Staff at Cockington Primary have access to a teacher library which houses a collection of 80 ‘essential reads’ from Pie Corbett’s Reading Spine. The collection of classic books is shared with children during their time at Cockington and help to create a living library inside the child’s mind.

Writing

At Cockington, our writing curriculum is designed to enable our children to become imaginative, engaging and precise writers who show control as well as adaptability in style when asked to write for a range of contexts, purposes and audiences. At the core of our curriculum is the belief that children should be taught using high quality texts that vary in genre, show cultural diversity and are matched to the needs of individual classes of children. By using this structure to shape our writing curriculum, the children are presented with a model which enables them to understand authors’ choices and intentions, demonstrating what an effective piece of writing looks like, as well as providing a solid understanding of grammar; this provides the children with clear end points and outcome pieces to work towards. Through teaching writing skills alongside these high-quality texts, children are shown how the choices that they make as a writer impact on the reader in differing ways. This robust curriculum is taught with a logical progression of texts so that children can build on their prior learning in a systematic way to ensure that intended knowledge and skills are acquired.

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