What can a high-quality oracy education achieve?

Evidence shows that a high-quality education can:

• Improve academic outcomes, developing learners who can think critically, reason together and have the vocabulary to express their knowledge and understanding.
• Improves literacy development.  The EEF literacy reports show that through structured classroom talk students, and particularly pupil premium students, literacy outcomes improve. 
• Increase confidence and wellbeing, empowering students with the belief that their voice has value, developing the ability to articulate thoughts so others will listen. 
• Equip students to thrive in life beyond school helping them to progress, access employment and engage in civic life. Successive employer surveys and reports from industry bodies such as the CBI, CIPD and IoD have highlighted the value businesses place on employees’ communication skills.
• Narrows gaps enabling disadvantaged students to fulfil their potential and shrink the language gap between them and more advantaged peers. 

We have worked on developing Oracy in schools, our plans can be found here.  We have considered the following research when developing our plans for Oracy across the school inlcuding working with Voice 21.

 

We also appreciate the importance of early language development and we are involved in Nuffield Early Language Intervention. The Nuffield Early Language Intervention (NELI) is a programme for children in Reception (4-5 years) which has been found to improve children’s language and early literacy skills. The programme involves a trained teaching assistant providing short small-group and individual teaching sessions to around 3-6 pupils for 20-weeks. Robust evaluations found NELI children made on average 3 months of additional progress in language.
More information can be found on the button below:

Phonics and Early Reading

Phonics teaching is a vital part of English. At Buckden CE Primary Academy we aim to teach children fluent word reading skills and provide a good foundation in spelling from the earliest opportunity.

Phonics teaching involves teaching the children to recognise the sounds that each individual letter makes; to identify the sounds that different combinations of letters make – such as ‘sh’  or ‘oo’ and to blend letter sounds together from left to right to make a word.

At Buckden, the Early Years and Key Stage 1 teachers use the ‘Story Time Phonics’ programme alongside a wide range of wonderful real books to teach phonics. The ‘StoryTime Phonics’ programme is a systematic synthetic program which is underpinned by ‘Letters and Sounds’ and uses real books to broaden the childrens’ exposure to high quality texts and to develop a love for books

In Foundation Stage, phonics is taught daily so that children can build up and practise the skills they need to use in reading and writing. Children are introduced to phonemes (sounds) linked to the letters of the alphabet, as well as one way of spelling each of the other 16 phonemes used in the English language, such as 'igh' and 'ch'. Children are taught to blend or sound out phonics to read a variety of words and segment or break down the sounds in simple words for spelling. ‘Story Time Phonics’ gives children a caption action for each sound, which supports children who learn in an active way.

In Year 1, children learn more about the variety of ways in which each phoneme can be spelled and they also learn about the different pronunciations made by different letters or groups of letters, such as 'a' in 'ant' and 'was'. At the end of Year 1, children will be tested on their phonics knowledge, using a national test featuring 20 real words and 20 pseudo-words (nonsense).

From Year 2 onwards, children consolidate their phonics knowledge, learning when to apply different spelling rules as well as how to spell plurals and different verb tenses.

Please click on the button below explaining all about Story Time phonics

We have considered what we teach in reading, please see below for examples of research:

At Buckden CE Primary Academy, we aim to inspire and motivate our pupils to become enthusiastic life long readers readers; pupils who read for pleasure and enjoyment and who also have the necessary skills to acquire knowledge and conduct research. 

Pie Corbett says…

Great books build the imagination. The more we read aloud expressively, and the more children are able to savour, discuss and reinterpret literature through the arts, the more memorable the characters, places and events become, building an inner world. A child who is read to will have an inner kingdom of unicorns, talking spiders and a knife that cuts into other worlds. The mind is like a ‘tardis’; it may seem small but inside there are many mansions. Each great book develops the imagination and equips the reader with language.

Great stories speak to us as individuals and some children will return to certain books again and again. Great stories also build our language because around 75 per cent of our vocabulary comes from our reading. Reading develops the ability to think in the abstract; to follow lines of thought. Schools that have a reading spine, build a common bank of stories that bind the community together. These are shared and deeply imagined common experiences.

The English curriculum at Buckden  is delivered using the National Curriculum English Document. The Early Learning Goals are followed to ensure continuity and progression from the Early Years Foundation stage through to the National Curriculum. It is interwoven through the Buckden School Curriculum and delivered through many vehicles including the Power of Reading. 
Click on link for more information:

Through our curriculum and reading provision, the pupils have the opportunity to experience a wide range of high quality and carefully chosen texts. This selection includes a range of fiction, non-fiction and poetry books which are often linked to our Enquiry curriculum

Having engaging and challenging core texts is one of the ways we encourage our pupils to develop a love of literature and to read for enjoyment. Evidence from research shows that ensuring our children develop all the skills of language is essential to unlocking access to the rest of the curriculum. Therefore, opportunities to read and write are embedded across the curriculum. This approach also expands our children’s knowledge of the world in which we live. When children encounter words in their reading that they would rarely hear or use in everyday speech, we can systematically teach our children new vocabulary. Therefore, rich and lively vocabulary instruction is an essential component of all our reading lessons. We know that by explicitly teaching vocabulary, we will encourage students to become interested and enthusiastic about words, curious and keen to explore relationships among words and use them in a way that they come to ‘own’ the words.

Children explore texts as part of a daily reading session. These are generally taught in whole class reading sessions or in guided groups, depending on the age/experience of the children and the texts themselves. These daily reading sessions provide opportunities for the pupils to explore texts in depth and further develop their word reading and comprehension skills. Building on their early reading learning, we continue to teach our children to decode unfamiliar words and increase the number of words they can read on sight. We focus on comprehension and teach our children skills such as summarising, posing questions about what they have read and making predictions and inferences. Children are also given time for independent reading and shared reading of class texts as well as regular book talk with adults.  Research which supports our approach to reading 

 

 

We encourage the children to also read at home regularly whether that is to an adult (for developing readers) or independently (for fluent readers). We provide a reading record book for this reading to be logged and we encourage children to discuss and talk about their reading at home. We have provided more information on how to listen to your children read on the following link:

At Buckden, we promote a love for books and for reading. All classes have a designated reading area that is full of age-appropriate books to engage the interests of the children and that also reflects the reading interests and preferences of the children in the class. All classrooms have access to subject specific books that further develop their curriculum knowledge. We encourage children to choose books from the school library to read and a celebratory ‘Book Week’, to coincide with ‘World Book Day’, is organised each year. During this week, a range of Reading for Pleasure activities are planned to promote enjoyment of reading.