Mrs Harwood is our English Lead. 

At Briar Hill we value the importance of speaking and listening and provide many opportunities for children to think, discuss, plan, learn and reflect in an imaginative and collaborative way.  We use Letters and Sounds for our daily phonics teaching and learning. We will share this approach with you in a range of ways throughout the year to help you support your child when reading/writing at home. Please refer to the notes in your child's reading diary for further information about the importance of our phonetic reading approach.  Alongside our daily phonic lessons we also teach pre-cursive and cursive handwriting through the 'Letterjoin' scheme with excellent outcomes for children. 

Parents can access this via letterjoin and the username: ak6372

Tablet password pattern is:  L shape          PC password: home

x x x

x x x

x x x

We promote a topic and text based approach to learning encouraging children to learn and remember more through meaningful, engaging and memorable texts.  We know that when we enable our children to become confident speakers, listeners, readers and writers they feel successful and are ready for the next stage of their learning. 

Decoding and Word Reading 

Decoding is the skill of recognising the letters (graphemes) and knowing what sound (phoneme) they say when sounded out. To learn to read and understand the phonetic code children must learn to recognise each phoneme. Phonemes can be made with one letter making one sound such 'b' or in b-e-d or or two letters making one sound such a 'ai' in p-ai-n or r-ai-n (these are called digraphs) or three letters making one sound such as 'igh' in n-igh-t or h-igh (these are called trigraphs). 

Please encourage your child to read and decode using their phonic skills. Securing their understanding of their taught phonics will enable them to access a broad range of texts as they are gradually developing their reading knowledge and skills.  Within phonics children are also taught words that cannot be decoded, called tricky words such as 'the' and 'said'. 

Prosody and Comprehension

Prosody is using appropriate expression and developing fluency. Comprehension is demonstrating an understanding of what you have read. 

Examples of English at Briar Hill