Reading at BFHA

At Bilsthorpe Flying High Academy, reading underpins everything we do. Through teaching a rich curriculum, we continuously expose our children to a broad range of high-quality texts. Here at Bilsthorpe Flying High Academy, we create lifelong readers, who enjoy reading and choose to read.

Every day, our children receive a reading lesson that focuses on firstly, teaching the skills of reading, through our synthetic phonics programme – No Nonsense Phonics (decoding, encoding, blending) and then, moving on to developing comprehension, prediction, inference and the understanding of vocabulary.

We strongly promote reading for pleasure and offer children the opportunities to share books and talk about what they have read. We have close links with our local village library and regular visits there ensure our children have the opportunity to choose and peruse the books they enjoy reading. We run a number of initiatives in school that promote reading. Our children receive a half termly reward if they climb all the way up our reading ladders, which are in every classroom and puts the onus on the children to read in their spare time.  Each class has a designated story time at the end of each day, and the children have input into which stories are shared.

Writing at BFHA

At Bilsthorpe Flying High Academy, we teach writing daily. We look for creative ways to engage our writers, and we closely link all our writing to other areas of the curriculum to make it purposeful and meaningful for our children.

Our children receive a daily English lesson, where writing is taught. We follow a three-week structure to our writing units, across the school.

Week 1	Immersion Experiencing the text Drama
Week 2	Grammar Punctuation Spelling
Week 3	Plan Draft Write Edit Present

We use high quality texts to bring the units to life. The units are carefully planned across both the year group and the school. This is to ensure that our children can build upon and further develop their previous learning, enabling them to leave our school being able to craft a variety of different pieces. At the end of each unit, the children’s work is displayed on our writing wall. This allows the children to see their work being published, as well as see the progression of writing throughout school.

We create opportunities to write across other areas of the curriculum, as this allows the children to demonstrate their knowledge and understanding of other areas of the curriculum.