Vocabulary 

Vocabulary knowledge is perhaps the most important factor when it comes to reading comprehension. At St Anne’s we provide opportunities for children to do lots of reading. It is through reading frequently and being read to, that children will most effectively acquire a broad vocabulary. We carefully select texts to include tier two vocabulary which will broaden children’s repertoire. These texts include information texts build into the curriculum, particularly English, science, geography, history and RE.

EYFS
The EYFS curriculum is a language-rich curriculum, built on a foundation of high- quality texts and vocabulary. Children are taught to be ‘word aware’ and to apply new curriculum throughout the school day within guided activities and continuous provision. We use the ShREC approach to developing dialogic conversations with all pupils.

KS1
Each lesson within the KS1 curriculum has a vocabulary focus and children are supported to apply new vocabulary to spoken and written responses through the use of teacher modelling, sentence stems, partner/ Kagan group talk, word banks, knowledge organisers etc.
Children enjoy twice weekly vocabulary lessons using the cross-curricular Bug Club vocabulary texts, devised by Mary Myatt, taught through a research-led vocabulary instruction sequence

KS2
Each lesson within the KS2 curriculum has a vocabulary focus and children are supported to apply new vocabulary to spoken and written responses through the use of teacher modelling, sentence stems, partner/ Kagan group talk, word banks, knowledge organisers etc.
Children receive a daily 10 minute vocabulary instruction to learn the etymology (Greek and Latin roots) of tier two words. This supports children to make links between words and have greater autonomy regarding the comprehension of new vocabulary.

For children to understand a text and ensure that they comprehend what they have read they must know the meaning of 95% of the words in a text.

Our pupils are faced with challenging texts on a daily basis and a good deal of the reading in our classrooms will include vocabulary that is unfamiliar and difficult. 

The words we use can be organised in to three tiers: