English in the Senior School

We continue to use a structured literacy approach, building upon the foundational building blocks previously taught.

Explicit Spelling

We teach further spelling patterns, rules and morphology through a systematic spelling programme called “The Code”. This enables our students to be accurate spellers.

Review previous rules
Practise blending for reading
Practise segmentation for spelling
Apply spelling rules at sentence level

Vocabulary

We explicitly teach students to understand new vocabulary in their reading instruction.

Explicit teaching of new and unknown vocabulary
Learn multiple meanings of words and word relationships (happy, content, joyous)
Apply new vocabulary learning in writing

Fluency

We use learning opportunities to improve decoding accuracy, automaticity and expression, which supports comprehension. Some strategies we use include:

Partner reading
Echo Reading
Choral Reading
Reading aloud

We also teach explicit cursive handwriting along with spelling to build fluency in writing. This helps children give more attention to idea generation and planning skills.

Comprehension

Reading fluently allows children to be able to give attention to the meaning of a text. Comprehension is the ability to understand what you are reading. We teach students to:

Build their background knowledge by exposing them to texts about different topics
Understand sentence structures
Understand text structures
Monitor their understanding as they read
Connect ideas
Think critically

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