English is a core subject nationally and core to what we want to achieve for the pupils at Cromwell High School.
There are two main areas of this subject:
- face to face communication: Speaking and Listening
- recorded communication: especially Literacy
There is clearly a huge cross-over with the vital area of 'communication' across the school but there is also a different emphasis. Whereas communication targets will focus narrowly on the most useful strategies for the pupil in the wider world, English will also give wider skills and stimulating experiences and key to these is the development of reading and enjoying books.
Pupils study English in classes grouped according to their needs so that teachers can accurately target their learning.
Pupils learning to read and write benefit from Shared and Guided Reading sessions. We call Reading "enjoying making sense of books". This is to stress that the essential skill of reading is decoding text using all the cues available; any pictures attached to the text, the overall meaning of the story as well as synthetic phonics. Equally writing is recording and presenting information. Pupils can achieve this through pre-prepared text, word-banks, computers, symbols and pictures as well as the important skill of pen/pencil control and general fine motor skills. Pupils learn much more effectively when they are happy, confident and motivated therefore all teaching strategies seek to develop these qualities. Literacy can include the most motivating areas for each pupil. School will not seek to over-correct pupils but rather teach them one step at a time and reinforce confidence through success, including the use of real life experiences as motivation and material for writing. We use the reading schemes "Rigby Star" and "Dockside" as appropriate and our teaching of phonics is based on the structure of "Letters and Sounds".
Pupils learning to use photographs and symbols can develop these skills in response to books including some classic stories. They can also develop their use of strategies such as Colourful Semantics including developing the of a "sentence strip" and the ability to build both spoken and written sentences following a given structure. Speaking and Listening is developed both through Colourful Semanics, through signing (sign assisted English), and through mini drama scenes that can teach target vocabulary through repetition.