At Monks Abbey Primary School, we strive to ensure that all children leave us literate, overcoming any disadvantage that may exist. Every child will leave Monks Abbey a Reader. Our pupils will develop a love of reading. Range of text types and genres. We know how important reading is to our pupils, and how it is a fundamental life skill. Our pupils will be able to comprehend what they read, and make well evidenced inferences. They will be able to partake in worthwhile and comprehensive book talk, demonstrating their deep understand of a text, including their view points and opinions. We understand the importance of reading for our pupils in their lives after Monks Abbey, to allow them to become well-adjusted young people and further their education and careers.
We teach writing so that children have the opportunity to write in a range of genres, allowing them to demonstrate their awareness of their audiences through their vocabulary choices and the sentence structures they deploy. Pupils will be 4 independent writers, who show a love of writing. They will apply their writing skills to a range of subjects across the curriculum, based around varied, high-quality model texts, that are of varied genres. Pupils will develop effective transcription and compositional skills. Children will be encouraged to ‘Write as a reader’, and base their writing on a chosen class text, following the ‘Power of Reading’ sequence of learning, building in extremely high-quality, purposeful book-talk. Children will grow in confidence throughout their time with us, given opportunities to plan, edit and evaluate their own, and their peers’, work across the school, allowing our pupils to produce writing that they can be proud of. Our pupils will apply grammar they have been taught effectively to their writing, across the curriculum. At Monks Abbey Primary School, we aim for all children to achieve the highest possible standards of spelling. We want children to spell well and to achieve satisfaction in spelling well. Whilst we do not want a fear of incorrect spelling to undermine children’s willingness and motivation to write using a broad range of ambitious vocabulary, we expect teachers to set clear expectations for children, so that all words previously taught are spelt correctly and that children have a range of strategies to help them spell unknown words. While it is important to remember that spelling is not the most important aspect of writing, confidence in spelling often has a profound effect on the writer’s self-image, therefore, we believe that a positive, motivating and interactive approach to spelling will encourage children to recognise their achievements. Through careful teaching and using specific strategies to develop spelling through its stages, we can encourage children to investigate and overcome spelling problems, thus becoming more confident writers.