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Lullingstone Roman Villa
Lullingstone Roman Villa
As part of our English Skills sessions, Year 4 have been working hard to develop their skills across the Primary English Curriculum. The curriculum is broad and the children have to experience a wide range of content and practise a wide range of skills. In order to achieve this, for both writing and reading, we focus on small steps and continuously build on and recall prior learning.
Reading
Reading
Across one week, children have the opportunity to practise many skills independently, in pairs and with an adult. Each task is carefully planned to ensure the key reading competencies are practised and revisited regularly. When learning a new skill or concept, we teach discretely in our English Skills sessions and then the children apply their learning in their reading tasks. We also appreciate how important it is to hear children read so every child reads with an adult at least once a week to ensure their books are appropriately challenging and for adults to help with the children's expression in reading.
The pictures feature some examples of the children's reading work to give you a flavour of how we approach the teaching of reading.
Writing
Writing
In Year 4, the children are expected to write longer pieces of writing but we understand how the best authors take their time and are continuously practising and improving their work. Before we write at length, we explore the genre we are writing in by looking at a model text and reading other examples. We discuss the features in detail, checking our knowledge, and then we practise using the techniques. The children are constantly exposed to high-quality texts and are encouraged and guided to highlight powerful or unknown vocabulary as well as interesting or emotive passages of writing. To help with their long-form writing, the children practise isolated skills through short burst writing sessions and are encouraged to then take these sentences and passages and use them in their longer piece of work. To offer further help and support, the children write along with the teacher to create a shared-write together that the children can use to structure their own work.
The pictures show an example of some exploratory and short burst writing tasks, as well as a couple of examples of the children's longer-form writing.
The Power of a Picture Book
The Power of a Picture Book
Picture books are often forgotten about in KS2 as the children move onto longer texts, but they are an incredibly powerful teaching and learning tool. Picture books help break down difficult concepts for children and children can learn a lot about structure and character. Each week, the children read a picture book with the teacher and use the Reading Rainbow lenses to help focus a discussion. We have read high-quality texts that feature diverse characters and deal with many complex themes such as loneliness, grief and isolation. These discussions around shorter texts allow children to practise their skills in making inferences, comparing and contrasting, making predictions and justifying their opinions, which they then apply to talking about their own, longer reading books.
World Book Day 2023!
World Book Day 2023!
As part of our whole-school celebrations for World Book Day, Lullingstone created creatures made of clay and a piece of writing based on 'The Mysteries of Harris Burdick'. The children were very enthusiastic about our chosen picture (the glowing pumpkin) and we had a lot of rich discussions around the image, including some ominous predictions. We wrote some poetry and then, using clay, we created creatures we imagined could be inside the glowing pumpkin. It was also wonderful to see the children dressed as their favourite characters and some children really committed to their new personas. World Book Day is a wonderful tradition and I hope you do make use of the book token and celebrate the occasion at home.
How You Can Help at Home
How You Can Help at Home
While we want the children to relax and recharge at the end of the school day, a little work at home can do wonders. Simple things like engaging with the spellings on Google Classroom, practising handwriting and writing short stories or recounts of the day can help children embed the learning they've done in school. As well as their writing skills, reading with your child/children or listening to them read is a great way to move their reading fluency along but it also helps to ensure that what they're reading is appropriately challenging. Having conversations about their book, such as asking them to summarise what's happened, helps them develop their key reading skills which will help them in their lessons. If you need any resources, for any subject, or advice then please grab the class teacher at the end of the day or get in touch with the office.
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