“Language and Literacy is an Area of Learning in the Curriculum. It focuses on developing children’s language and literacy skills. These enable children to interact effectively in the world around them, express themselves creatively and communicate confidently.” (NI Curriculum)

In Dundela we are committed to raising all pupils’ standard of Literacy and actively encourage every child to reach their full potential within this subject.

Every classroom is a Literacy rich environment; we have stimulating Literacy resources and adopt various teaching and learning strategies to suit all learning styles and needs.

We promote a love for reading. This is done through using exciting texts, guided reading, modelled reading, shared reading and in Key Stage 1, paired reading. We teach reading through carefully selected strategies and schemes. These are progressive, increasing in difficulty as pupils transition from the Foundation Stage to Key Stage 1.

We follow the child friendly ‘Jolly Phonics’ and ‘Jolly Grammar’ schemes to teach early phonological awareness and move towards more complex sounds, spellings and key elements of grammar and punctuation. Our pupils are motivated by the actions, songs, visuals, puppets, activities and the exciting Jolly Phonics’ software.

From the beginning of P1 to the end of P3, our children travel through an exciting journey of writing. Their journey includes mark making to develop pre writing skills, learning how to form letters correctly, writing simple sentences and then progresses to a more extended approach to writing in which they write lengthier independent pieces across a variety of genres.

Within this section of the website you will find evidence of our Literacy rich environments, information and useful videos for Jolly Phonics and Jolly Grammar, our approach to teaching reading and spellings and useful website links to further develop your child’s Literacy skills.

“The more you read, the more things you know. The more that you learn, the more places you will go.” Dr Seuss