Literacy

We promote a love of literacy throughout Green Lane and from the first day that our children join us in the nursery, we immerse children in songs, stories, sounds and rhymes.  We believe children should be able to flourish in a language rich environment and so a high emphasis is placed upon speaking and listening. Discussion and drama is always the starting point for our children’s learning.

We teach children to become fluent and confident readers so that they progress quickly from learning to read to reading to learn. Weekly guided reading sessions allow children to become expressive readers who can successfully obtain meaning from texts.  Our reading scheme, guided reading library and a well stocked whole school library all help to create an ethos where the children highly value the love and care of books. Our weekly story time club and recent book week, which saw a variety of visitors sharing their favourite books with our children have deepened this enthusiasm for reading further.

Our children write for a variety of purposes and different audiences in response to a wide range of interesting stimuli.  We use films, stories, plays, poems, information books and ‘real’ texts such as leaflets and catalogues to inspire our children’s writing as well as providing real life experiences to engage them further. We regularly teach handwriting using a cursive style and link this to the teaching of spelling where we provide children with a range of strategies to become effective spellers.

To foster an enthusiasm for writing further, every Thursday children participate in the Big Write which concentrates on good models of writing and will help to unpick for the children what they need to do in order to improve their writing as well as embed important basic skills.

We value links between home and school and we hold successful annual parent Literacy workshops to ensure parents are aware of how we teach different aspects of Literacy at Green Lane. We also run family learning courses at which parents are taught strategies to support their child’s literacy development at home.

Please view our recent Literacy Ofsted report to read about the LEA’s judgments of Literacy at Green Lane.