Coningsby St Michael's Church of England Primary School
Believe. Aspire. Succeed.
Active English is a whole-school support package for the teaching of grammar, writing and punctuation. It is aimed at year 2-year 4 but more recently year 5 & 6. It can be used flexibly across all year groups to meet the needs of pupils. What is important, is that there is a whole-school approach, with all teachers and teaching assistants being supported to implement the programme consistently across the school. It uses the principles of mnemonics to embed learning in an active and engaging way, providing pupils with a deeper grasp of language that serves as a foundation for their future.
Children at CSM are already embracing the ditties and can recall individual grammar phrases. This will ultimately help them to use the correct grammar in all their writing with confidence and creativity.
Please see video for more information about Active English. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqXS4ThecUU
Spellings
Research, as well as classroom experience, indicated that a lack of competence in spelling can cause severe problems to young writers. They may feel embarrassed and frustrated. This may lead them to write fewer words and create compositions of lower quality, which are limited to the words they know they can spell (Joshi et al, 2009)
Spelling is a skill which is learned, not an innate ability and therefore it can and should be taught.
We allow discrete time for our pupils to study words and thus build their knowledge of how words are constructed. Children in turn develop their own repertoire of to aid the learning and retention of spellings and vocabulary.
Staff will:
Share the word first- use metacognition strategy of I do, we do, you do
Use:
a)morphology- do the children know the meaning of the word (verbal or written)
b)Orthology- they must:
•Study the word- box up/ list of questions (what is the first word/last word/prefix/suffix/root words/ascenders/descenders/ double letters/ digraphs etc)
•Write the word 5 times on wbs, rub it out each time and rewrite it- check against the spelling you have modelled