Ticehurst and Flimwell Church of England Primary School

At Ticehurst and Flimwell we are implementing Literacy Tree, which is a completely book based approach which is based around a "Teach around the Text" pedagogy. This has restructured our delivery of the English curriculum and works in alignment with the Principles of our whole school Teaching and Learning pedagogy.

There is a culture that app children can succeed in becoming confident proficient readers and writers with a love of language, literature and the spoken word.

• Writing and Reading are taught in discrete targeted sessions daily and throughout the curriculum in cross-curricular ways.                                      
• Each lesson expects all pupils to contribute to enaging and meaningful drama, discussion and debate as children are immersed in texts from a wide range of literary worlds. All ccontributions are valued.                         
• Through writing lessons pupils are given opportunities to write for a clear audience and with specific purposes.                                                        
• Explicit teaching of writing and grammar conventions develops skills which improve outcomes for pupils as writers.                         
• Frequent opportunities to write in daily lessons applying writing conventions support good progress and attainment in writing.       
• Application of vocabulary and conventions that build on prior knowledge are taught within the eivdence base that works within the capacity of working memory.
• Teachers model expectations clearly and opportunities are given within the whole school teaching pedgagogy to practise application as a class, as a pair and individually.
• Assessment is ongoing, reflective and accurate in planning next steps of learning.                                                                                                             
• Scaffolds are planned and implemented and to enable appropriate and graduated pathways to independence in learning.

• Within our Reading Aproach we implement dedicated daily reading lessons,  teaching the six core skills of reading, or ‘VIPERS’.
• VIPERS is an acronym to aid the recall of the six reading domains as part of the National Curriculum. They are the key areas which we feel children need to know and understand in order to improve their comprehension of texts.
• The six domains focus on the comprehension aspect of reading.
• Fluency is developed through: daily reading and group reading, Supersonic Phonic Friends lessons and cross curricular reading in foundation subjects.
• Our Reading Approach uses the VIPERS skills to ensure that teachers ask, and children are familiar with, a range of questions. Through this, teachers explicitly model each of the VIPERS skills and how to implement these skills when faced with a range of question types. Children are then encouraged to have a go through the ‘I do, we do, you do’ strategy before working to apply the taught skill independently.
• Pupils are taught VIPERS skills within targeted groups using books which match their current level of reading development.
• The VIPERS approach was chosen as it allows the teacher to track the type of questions asked and assess where the children’s strengths are within each of the six areas of reading comprehension.
• There are daily reading sessions which use quality texts that expose children to rich vocabulary and language and which foster a love of language . Teachers model expressive reading within a whole class context.