Literacy

Purpose of Study

At Southridge we aim to enable our children to enjoy quality experiences that will enhance their knowledge, skills and understanding in Literacy. We encourage them to be  enthusiastic and critical readers of stories, poetry and drama as well as non-fiction and become lifelong learners as readers and writers. They will explore global issues through writing (for example, persuasive writing and spoken language) and write with confidence, fluency and understanding, orchestrating a range of independent strategies to self monitor and correct. Each year, children will write a range of text types (fiction and non-fiction) and in a range of genres and be able to write in a variety of styles and form appropriate to the situation and increase their ability to use planning and drafting to improve their work.

We are extremely proud of the very high standards our children reach in reading here at Southridge and we strive to enable pupils to become independent and enthusiastic readers who can use their knowledge of graphemes and phonemes to decode fluently, accessing texts independently as soon as possible. We use the Read, Write, Inc. phonics scheme to do this, and the associated guide reading book series. Children are taught to develop instant recognition of some common exception words and draw on their knowledge of other word and sentence level structures as their decoding becomes automatic so that they can tackle more complex texts. Children are given the opportunity to read in meaningful situations and for a range of purposes. Through a carefully chosen range of quality texts they will learn to read with enjoyment and perceive reading as an activity which is a source of both pleasure and information.

The National Curriculum states that English has a pre-eminent place in education and in society. A high-quality education in English will teach pupils to speak and write fluently so that they can communicate their ideas and emotions to others, and through their reading and listening, others can communicate with them. Through reading in particular, pupils have a chance to develop culturally, emotionally, intellectually, socially and spiritually. Literature, especially, plays a key role in such development. Reading also enables pupils both to acquire knowledge and to build on what they already know. All the skills of language are essential to participating fully as a member of society; pupils who do not learn to speak, read and write fluently and confidently are effectively disenfranchised.