Literacy
All pupils participate in a literacy hour each day. This is designed to promote knowledge, skills and understanding in reading and writing. The structure of the hour also offers opportunities for pupils to develop their speaking and listening skills. For a large part of the hour, the teacher works with the whole class on such aspects of language as sounds, the meanings of words, spelling patterns, grammar or the style and format of different kinds of texts. Then follow-up tasks, which address a specific objective, are completed. Opportunities are also created, outside of the literacy hour, for the children to have further experiences of extended writing, reading and speaking and listening activities. To complement this, the teacher also leads a guided reading session for 20 minutes each day, which focuses specifically on the reading and comprehension skills of a particular group of children. Whilst this arrangement means that teachers may give less time to hearing individual children read, we believe that parents have a vital role to play, in providing opportunities for their children to share books with them. Children, throughout the school, are encouraged to take reading books home to enjoy with their parents.