English

Miss Sharma

English Lead

At Shefford Lower School, we aim to foster a love of language and reading and attach great importance to enabling our children to become fluent readers, whilst promoting reading

Reading for enjoyment. We aim to develop independence and fluency in all readers to ensure a life-long love of reading and ensuring that they can all achieve their full potential across all areas of the curriculum.

We approach reading in different ways; reading for pleasure, embedding it within all subjects in the curriculum and teaching reading skills explicitly.

Through reading and writing in particular, children have a chance to develop culturally, emotionally, intellectually, socially and spiritually. Reading and writing enables pupils both to acquire knowledge and to build on what they already know. Our ethos is that all our children are capable of achieving highly and that we as lead practitioners will provide the right learning experiences for this to happen. Learning is our core purpose and we are committed to building children’s capacity to develop as independent confident and reflective learners. In order to do this we have designed a knowledge rich curriculum with key concepts, powerful knowledge, transferable vocabulary and skills that deepen and ensure enduring understanding, formed from evidential research.

At Shefford Lower School, we believe that the most important skill a child can develop during their primary years is the ability to read independently and understand and enjoy what they read. Reading opens the door to learning across the whole curriculum and supports lifelong learning.

We provide a structured approach to the teaching of reading through dedicated reading lessons, alongside opportunities to apply these skills across our curriculum.

Reading for Pleasure

Alongside the teaching of reading skills, we are committed to fostering a love of reading. Research shows that children who read regularly for pleasure often perform better across the curriculum.

At Shefford Lower, we encourage children to explore and enjoy a wide range of high-quality fiction and non-fiction texts. We purposefully plan for high quality and engaging texts to be built into our curriculum and we aim to create enthusiastic readers who see reading as both enjoyable and valuable.