At Springfield Juniors, we are aiming for communication to lie at the heart of classroom practice where pupils learn through, and are taught to talk. Believing that literacy and communication are life skills, we aspire to develop these and equip pupils with the ability to become life-long learners. We are striving to enable all pupils to use speech to express their thoughts and communicate articulately with others.
Weekly talking assemblies and follow up lessons in class, allow the children to discuss a range of current news topics , enabling them to develop their oracy skills through exploratory and presentational talk.
During January the whole school participated in a "Story Telling" week where John Harris (a children's author) performed to every class. Following on from this the pupils re-told a range stories in a school competition. Ten lucky children from Year 4 were chosen to perform "The Man in Search of his Luck" at the Wolsey theatre in front of a live audience.
Adding a stage to our canopy area has encouraged pupils to perform to their peers at playtimes including poetry recitals, short plays and talking on a topic of their choice.
One Year 5 class took part in a mentor lead debating programme which developed their ability to make clear arguments to put across their views and how to disagree with an idea using a rebuttal. Each Year 5 class will be developing their debating skills in the weekly oracy sessions.
Maraiker (a puppeteer) is a regular visitor to Springfield and she allows children to develop their oracy skills further through puppet workshops.
Across the years, the love of reading is nurtured and pupils develop as confident, competent readers who are encouraged to use the school library and access a wide range of fiction and non-fiction texts. We have an inviting library which is open at lunch times where it is staffed by adult and pupil librarians (from across the year groups). In addition, this year it has also been open to parents and pupils as a book café and at the end of each half term teachers have shared stories to regular attenders.
World book day 2019 and design a box competition photos
In addition the Accelerated Reader Programme allows us to monitor and support all pupils' independent reading. Class, year group and whole school competitions engage pupils in reading. All pupils participate in a range of Guided Reading activities within their class, as well as experiencing a range of literature through class shared texts.
Writing is an integral part of the whole school curriculum. A wide range of teaching strategies (including sentence staking), cross-curricular stimuli, purposes and audiences are explored across the school to support children's writing. Grammar and spelling are taught both independently as well as embedded in all literacy lessons.
Children's creativity is enhanced through a weekly before school writing group run by Fred Sedgewick (a children's author).
