Intent

At Farnborough Grange, we aim for all children to become storytellers through a rich and varied diet of high quality texts taken from Pie Corbett's Reading Spine. Through this, we aim to empower our children to express themselves creatively and imaginatively, whether they are immersed in reading, composing written texts or engaging in oral presentations and drama. 

Each of our learning enquiries use a variety of carefully selected texts that lend themselves to the children’s interests, styles of learning and support children to achieve their next steps. We are passionate about encouraging our children to take risks and to try out new vocabulary, both in their oral storytelling and their subsequent story writing. 

Reading

Our children develop a love of reading through their exposure to our rich and varied diet of high quality texts that have been chosen from Pie Corbett's Reading Spine and from careful research. This passion is nurtured through opportunities to share books with their peers, as well as regular opportunities to share books with adults both at school and at home. At Farnborough Grange, this shared storytelling is an integral part of our aim in creating a love of reading and thus, story time is built into our timetable on a daily basis with varied opportunities. We also recognise the value in supporting our families in becoming confident storytellers with their children and provide opportunities for parents to engage in our rich storytelling culture. Rich and stimulating books are available for the children to read and explore, both in classrooms and in our library. Library time is an integral part of our weekly timetable where children can choose library books to share at home. As a school, we also run reading events across the school year such as Roald Dahl day, World Book Day and reading challenges to promote and celebrate a love of reading. The children learn to read by following the Read Write Inc scheme devised by Ruth Miskin. Through their daily phonics lessons, reading opportunities and whole class teaching they are given the tools to make them successful readers. 

Writing

Across the school, we follow a clear structure for the teaching of writing which empowers our children to learn the skills needed to become engaging storywriters. Children are immersed in our carefully selected texts before being given the opportunity to imitate, thus paying great attention to the formal structures of English as well as grammar, punctuation and spelling. It is here that teachers model writing strategies and the use of phonics and spelling strategies in shared writing sessions. Guided writing targets the specific needs of all children, whilst giving regular opportunities to write at length in extended, independent writing sessions. Within our writing planning, we provide opportunities for our children to write in different styles and for a variety of audiences and within this, we try to hold onto the purpose of writing. We use quality texts as a model and provide a range of engaging stimuli for writing including music, drama and objects. For children to become writers, providing feedback as they write is invaluable in supporting them to edit and review their learning. All classes use working walls to support the children and our marking system enables the children to recognise what their next steps are.