What is the 'English Area' ?

My names is Mrs Jackson and here at Meopham, I am a Year 5 class teacher and the school's English Subject Lead.

The role of English Leader could be summarised as follows:

• To lead the teaching of English in order to secure high quality teaching and learning and the effective use of resources to bring about improved standards of achievement for all pupils.

I am charged with developing, implementing, monitoring and maintaining English teaching policies and practices which reflect the school’s commitment to high achievement and which are consistent with national and school strategies and policies.

I initiate schemes of work that offer appropriate challenges to all pupils and, upon evaluation, demonstrate that they have been successful in enabling the pupils to make good progress.

Our English area will be used to advertise the reading and writing schemes that we use here at Meopham Community Academy to improve the attainment and progress of our pupils in English.

Mrs Jackson

English Subject Lead

WE ARE KENT LITERACY AWARD 2020 WINNERS!

Award for: Hot Reads, Take One Book and whole class guided reading

Specialisation: Best promotion of reading for pleasure

As the English Subject leader at M.C.A. I feel extremely proud to announce that our school has received a Kent Literacy Award.

The award recognises our desire to promote reading for pleasure within the school community. Reading is such an important area of our curriculum as it lays the foundations for learning in all subjects.

New, exciting and relevant texts have been introduced to our Key Stage 2 classes including: The Boy at the Back of the Class, There's a Boy in the Girls' Bathroom, The Firework Maker’s Daughter, The Train to Impossible Places and A Place Called Perfect. Reading 'VIPERS' have been introduced to focus on reading skills in our reading sessions. Vocabulary, Infer, Predict, Explain, Retrieve and Summarise/Sequence are the core skills we focus on.

I would like to mention our fantastic Year 5 (now Year 6) reading ambassadors, who have been an important part of promoting reading for pleasure at M.C.A. They were responsible for planning and leading various activities at school during our 'Wild' themed book week including our story in a jar competition and exhibition, a book character scavenger hunt and reading taster sessions in our reading café.

During book week, different members of staff shared a bedtime story on our school website to promote the reading of a daily story. Parents were invited to join us in school for shared reading sessions and to view an exhibition of story jars. Author David Litchfield shared one of these jars on his Twitter account as it represented his book: The Bear and the Piano. We enjoyed a two-day visit from author Adam Guillain as he sparked an enthusiasm for reading (and writing) with lively assemblies and class workshops.

Children participated in Reading Bingo Challenges during the Christmas and summer break. It was fantastic to see them continuing their reading in different environments and across a range of genres. For the first two weeks (on our return to school) we used the book 'Here We Are' by Oliver Jeffers and the whole school created displays, scrapbooks and videos as a 'book' helped to reunite our school community after an unusual year.

A special mention and thank you must also go the Mrs Farrington, our Accelerated Reader lead, who organises the distribution of certificates, monitors and displays targets achieved and helps all the teachers and children with everything AR.

We really do have a wonderful community and team here at M.C.A. Keep reading everyone. If you haven’t found the right book yet, keep looking. Ask any member of staff in our community, ask other children, look out for a reading ambassador or come and ask me. There are some fantastic reads out there and many new reads arriving…

Keep on reading! Well done to everyone!

Mrs Jackson

Year Group Writing Overviews

Please take a look at your child's year group wirting overview. This will show you what they will be learning during English lessons throughout the year:

How we teach handwriting

At Meopham Community Academy we recognise the importance for children to learn to write fluently and legibly. In order to achieve this, children are taught to write in a cursive style from Reception all the way through to Year 6. In order that you can support your child with their handwriting, we have published the cursive alphabet that we use here at Meopham:

Letter-join

Handwriting in Reception

What can be more fun than learning to draw spirals and zig-zags? Patterns and pre-cursive shapes can be challenging for young pupils, but Letter-join in Reception, introduces joined-up handwriting to our youngest pupils.

Via our class boards, we share Letter-join’s animations that demonstrate the pre-cursive patterns that we are learning that week. the children then trace these with pencils onto printed sheets or they can be copied by air-writing or by tracing on our classroom tablets

Watching and copying the shapes of letters and the various joining techniques will enable pupils to learn to write simple words in a cursive style at this early stage in their education.

Handwriting in Key Stage 1

KS1 is the time to introduce new letterforms (capital letters, numbers, printed letters and punctuation) and Letter-join animates all of these to show the correct formation and provides ready-made worksheets for labelling and form-filling using capital and printed letters.

As a school, we are looking for our pupils to improve their handwriting so that they are able to produce 'display-quality' work daily in their writing books. We look for neater presentation, writing on the line consistent size and spacing.

For more information on Letter-join and all of it's features and benefits, please follow this link:

Letter-join Home/School Access

Use the link below to login to your Home/School account

Pen Licence

In Key Stage 2 children work towards achieving a pen licence. This means that they no longer have to write in pencil but may write using a pen which is provided by the school. In order to achieve this children should master the following skills taken from the national curriculum:

Give Me 5!

Give Me Five is a whole school initiative which focuses on encouraging reading at home five of the seven days in a week.

Research from the National Literacy Trust highlights the importance of reading:

Young people who get a lot of encouragement to read at home are more likely to enjoy reading, to read frequently, to have positive attitudes towards reading and to believe that reading is important to succeed in life

Each week we will be asking that your child aims to read to an adult at home five out of the seven possible days therefore filling up five boxes in their reading record book. Of course, if you and your child want to read everyday then that is definitely allowed - we suggest a minimum of 15 minutes per day for children in Key Stage 2.

Each day that your child reads at home, please date and leave comment. Then, at the end of the school week, your child's teacher will check the reading record book to look for 'Give Me Five'. Any children who have read five times during that week will get a sticker in their reading record to acknowledge their efforts.

Children who read five times a week will be awarded an extra ‘Brilliant Blue’ raffle ticket and be entered into their class raffle for a chance of winning a little prize.

We hope that this initiative will enable your children to continue to enjoy their reading at home. If you have any further questions please speak to your child’s class teacher or contact Mrs Heasman via a message in your child's contact book.

Reading for Enjoyment

Here at Meopham, we use a number of approaches to encourage a love of reading in our pupils.

'Gold Readers' is an initiative which targets the most able readers in Year 6. The aim is to encourage the children to read and discuss a wide-range of genres and authors and develop higher-level reading skills.

They are given access to a selection of books chosen for their challenging  language and/or themes. These books are located on the 'Year 6 Gold Readers' golden shelf in the KS2 corridor and the children are able to choose books from here at any time. The groups meet once a week in the Year 6 library.

Reading Mentors come in from Meopham School on a weekly-basis to listen to readers in different classes at Meopham Community Academy. This will benefit our pupils in developing their reading skills and the students from Meopham School in helping develop their teaching skills.

We have introduced Peer-to-Peer editing into our lower Key Stage 2 classes. This is an initiative where we release Year 6 children, during English time, to help children in Year 3 and Year 4 to self-edit and improve their independent writing.

We regularly invite volunteer readers (pupil's parents and grandparents) who kindly give up an hour of their day to come in and read with children in Key Stage 1 on a weekly or twice weekly basis . With tutoring from our teachers, the parents are also asked to discuss with the child what they have read. This enables our pupils to demonstrate their understanding of the text. If you would like to become a parent helper, simply follow this link: