Meet Larry: Our Longmoor Curriculum Literacy Character

Larry adores Literacy! He enjoys writing in different genres – poetry, fictional stories, factual reviews and playscripts. He will write about absolutely anything!

Larry wants you to always remember your punctuation and to push yourself to include as many different skills as possible. He insists you always use capital letters and full stops. Larry will be proud of you for always attempting to use interesting vocabulary, remembering a range of sentence openers and encourages you to use the very best handwriting you can!

Literacy at Longmoor 

Reading and writing are essential skills in all of our lives because we use them every day. Here at Longmoor Primary School, we work very hard at ensuring our Literacy lessons are purposeful and interesting; teaching our children the important skills that will make them fantastic readers, amazing writers and successful learners. These skills are vital for all subjects in the curriculum because they all have some form of reading and writing in them. We purposefully plan in opportunities for reading and writing in other subjects so the children are transferring their skills.

Literacy is taught everyday throughout the whole school. In these lessons, engaging texts are used to read and teach the key skills of writing. 

We learn new vocabulary that we ‘magpie’ from great authors to use and improve our writing. 

Modelled writing is used as an effective teaching strategy so the children can see and hear how a ‘writer’ (teacher) thinks and makes decisions about sentence structure, vocabulary choices and punctuation in order to have an effect on the reader. 

Speaking and listening, drama, annotating texts, group work, debate, pictures, ICT, DVD clips and recordings are all used to enrich the learning and inspire our children. 

From years 2 to 6, the children take part in Spelling Shed. Spelling Shed is a scheme designed to meet the needs of the 2014 National Curriculum in a manageable way. The focus of the programme is on the teaching of spelling, which embraces knowledge of spelling conventions, patterns and rules. Spelling Shed is an online programme, where the children can learn their weekly spellings, play games and have fun whilst learning.

Through marking, we ensure that the children know what they have achieved well and what they need to do to improve and progress their writing. Quality time is given in lessons for the children to be able to read the marking comments and then improve some of their writing. 

Reading and comprehension are equally an important aspect of our curriculum too. Children are heard read as often as possible and whole class reading is completed daily in Key Stage 2. 

Comprehending a text is integral to the enjoyment of reading it – if you don’t understand what the text is about then it just becomes words on a page! Comprehension skills are taught in our curriculum as specific lessons and also through our guided reading sessions.

We really encourage the children to read as often as possible, including at home. Every teacher reads aloud a class story book, which the children thoroughly enjoy hearing and sharing. Children also enjoy bringing in their own books that have been linked to our topics.

Every morning the children come into school to read as part of our Accelerated Reading program. Accelerated Reader is a computer-based program that we use to monitor reading practice and progress in school. The children enjoy taking short quizzes after reading a book to check if they’ve understood it. Accelerated Reader (AR) is a is proving to be a popular reading program at Longmoor and the children have really got to grips with the activities involved. 

Our Literacy curriculum is at the heart of what we teach and learn at Longmoor Primary School.