Reading

At Northfield, we love reading. Our children enjoy a wide range of colour book banded books carefully matched to their ability and have the opportunity to choose from our extensive library too. Every child is encouraged to read at home and at school as much as possible and they love to work towards our Reading Challenge! After recording their reading, each child has the opportunity to move from Bronze level all the way up to Rose level. This is celebrated weekly in our special Gold assembly. By completing the Reading Challenge, you are also entered into a weekly prize draw to win a brand-new book! 

 At Northfield, we teach children to not only be able to read a text fluently, but also be able to understand what they have read confidently. We do this through inference techniques. In the following attachment, you can see the teaching strategies we follow to help children with their inference skills. Your child will be familiar with these, and they will support your child when they are reading at home. 

In addition to our extensive school library, we also use the online learning platforms Get Epic and Read Theory to enable our children to not only read but answer fun quizzes electronically. 

Early Readers

For those pupils who are not yet secure in their early reading skills we use the Rapid Phonics intervention programme to ensure that pupils secure their knowledge in phonics and gain the necessary skills to make rapid progress in early reading skills so that they are able to close the gap and make rapid progress towards age-related expectations. 

Spelling

At Northfield we follow a clear spelling scheme throughout the school. This page contains information on personal spelling lists and some useful links to spelling games and activities to help with learning spellings. We use Spelling Shed to enable the children to learn their spellings at home and at school. All children have a Spelling Shed log in and they love using it!

Handwriting

At Northfield we follow a clear, easy to follow handwriting scheme. Attached are examples of joins, line guides and samples of work for you to look at.

In Years 3 and 4, the beginner handwriting guidelines are used. At first children learn to use the guidelines by writing on top. When they form all of their letters correctly, the children move on to using the guidelines under plain paper.

In Years 5 and 6, pupils use the standard guidelines to refine their handwriting style, making letters smaller and clearer.