Reading
Students in upper school and lower school have dedicated reading time every day, with many following the Accelerated Reader programme and others using the Oxford Reading Tree scheme.
Accelerated Reader is a programme that encourages students to read for enjoyment with motivational quizzes that are taken after reading each book. The Accelerated Reader book levels ensure that students are reading at a level that is appropriate to their ability and students enjoy getting immediate feedback from the book quizzes.
The Accelerated Reading scheme also provides staff with analytical data regarding progress. Staff can monitor individual progress and print certificates at various stages to reward achievement.
The Accelerated Reading Home Connect service allows parents and carers to see their child’s reading progress and book quiz results. This can be accessed by using the log in details provided by the class teacher (lower school) or form tutor (upper school).
Oxford Reading Tree is the UK’s number one reading scheme and has a variety of genres, writing styles and artwork styles for every level.
Shape Coding at Heathlands
Many pupils at Heathlands use BSL (British Sign Language) as their preferred language or support their speech with signing. BSL and English have different grammatical structures and one of the tools used at Heathlands to support the development of English structure and vocabulary (both spoken and written) is Shape Coding. This system also benefits students who do not yet have a fully developed first language and those with language impairments.
The Shape Coding system was designed by Susan Ebbels (a speech and language therapist) to teach English grammatical structure, allowing the parts of a sentence to be demonstrated in a visual way.
In secondary lessons Shape Coding is used to:
- Support students to construct sentences that follow English word order.
- Help students understand and write different types of sentences.
- Draw attention to different types of questions.
- Develop student’s knowledge of word classes and expand their vocabulary.
- Develop students’ understanding how suffixes and prefixes change the meaning of a word.
Examples of the shapes used in Shape Coding can be found in student planners, along with some common sentence structures. You can contact your child’s form tutor to find out more about how shape coding is being used in lessons.