Curriculum Interventions

At Stoneyholme Primary School, children's progress in English and Mathematics is monitored on a daily basis by class teachers and at half termly progress meetings. Most children make excellent progress through quality first differentiated teaching. However, for a variety of reasons, some children may require additional support at times to help them catch up with their peers or to make the best progress they can. These pupils benefit from additional time limited small group or one-to-one interventions to enable them to make the progress needed to achieve their full potential.

A variety of intervention support programmes designed to target pupils according to their needs, accelerate their progress and secure their learning are implemented within school. Class teachers and teaching assistants who may be delivering intervention programmes meet on a weekly basis to discuss the progress of these pupils and ensure that each child is receiving the support that is just right for them. The Senior Leadership Team devise a Provision Map each half term to ensure that children who need additional intervention receive the right balance of whole class teaching, additional support in class and small group or individual programmes for which they may be withdrawn from the classroom for short periods of time.

The pages below describe the interventions currently in place.

Talking Together (Ginger Bear)

School can be a frustrating and confusing experience for children who have not developed their communication skills; not only will access to the curriculum be difficult, so will developing co-operative skills and friendships.

Ginger bear helps to teach and develop spoken language and social interaction skills to children aged 4-6. We deliver it over 40 sessions, twice a week, and aim to develop the "rules" of interaction with the help of the character Ginger the Bear, who features in all the activities we do. Skills we teach include: eye contact, taking turns, sharing, greetings, awareness of feelings, following instructions, listening, paying attention, and play skills.

Race into English

This programme aims to break down the language barrier and support those who:

Are beginners in learning English;
Have limited English;
Are more fluent in English but need additional support to make progress.

After a comprehensive assessment to establish their needs, children take part in a wide range of motivating and relevant activities to develop their functional and academic understanding of and fluency in English.

Fast Track Phonics

Through phonics, children will develop key skills to help them achieve as readers and writers. Most pupils will reach the expected level of understanding through following our systematic daily phonics programme (Letters and Sounds). However, some children may have more difficulty in acquiring these skills and for these children a phonics catch up programme may be required.

Fast Track Phonics has been developed by the Lancashire Literacy Team to support children in Year 2 who did not achieve the expected level in the Year 1 Phonics Check. It is designed to address gaps in learning and is intended to be run in addition to the quality daily phonics teaching. We may identify children in other year groups who we feel would benefit from the programme.

Fast Track phonics is a 14 week programme which focuses on the key skills of all good phonics programmes which are:

Letter to sound correspondence.
Blending sounds to support reading.
Breaking words into sounds to support writing.
Blending and breaking as reversible processes.

Fast Forward Grammar

Fast Forward Grammar has been developed by the Lancashire Literacy Team to support children in Year 6 who are not on track to achieve the expected level by the end of Key Stage 2. This intervention has been designed to address gaps in learning and would run alongside quality first teaching of Grammar in the classroom.

Fast Forward Grammar is a twelve week programme with three sessions planned for each week. It focuses on:

The structure of a sentence
Word classes
Aspects of punctuation

Each session lasts for approximately twenty minutes.

Not all children will need to undertake the whole of the programme - teachers will identify which areas of grammar each child needs additional support with.

Boosting Reading Potential (BRP)

This intervention is for pupils who can read, but need a little extra work on fluency, story voice and pace. The main aim is to develop independent reading and comprehension skills. It aims enable children to be independent problem solvers who read with understanding and enjoyment.

Boosting Reading Potental is a 10 week intervention programme delivered one-to-one, by a trained adult three times a week. Each session lasts15 minutes and includes:

• Practising independent reading skills on familiar texts

• Ongoing assessment

• Working on unfamiliar text with support, leading to independence and understanding.

Reading Revival

Reading Revival is based on the principles of the Reading Recovery intervention. It provides an extra learning opportunity for children who are having difficulties with reading and writing after about a year at school.

The programme is different for every child. It begins with what the child can do , builds upon what s/he is trying to do and works out what s/he needs to learn how to do next.

The teaching is individually designed and individually delivered by a qualified teacher. Each child has an intensive half-hour daily lesson which supplements regular class teaching.

The focus is on understanding messages (in reading) and constructing messages (in writing), so highest priority is given to children reading many books and writing their own texts. They learn to pay attention to the detail of print without losing the focus on meaning. Reading Revival equips children with ways of increasing their own control of reading and writing so that they can continue to learn on their own.

The Reading Revival lessons finish when the child is judged to be able to cope well with reading and writing, and to work successfully with the average group in the classroom, which takes around 15-20 weeks.

The lessons follow a pattern of:

Familiar reading - the children read one or two books that they have read previously in order to develop confidence.
Reading a recently introduced book - the children apply what they have been learning to something less familiar.
Letter and word work - the children develop fast recognition of letters, practise letter formation if needed and breaking and making words.
Writing a short story - this may be just a sentence or two.
Ordering their cut up sentence.
Introduction of a new book.

Early Literacy Support (ELS)

Early Literacy Support is an intervention programme designed to raise attainment levels in literacy. It is for children who will benefit from a more intensive programme of study in addition to the quality first teaching within the classroom. This means that the children undertaking this programme will still participate in all literacy lessons in the classroom but will also be provided with additional opportunities for them to consolidate key literacy objectives.

Reinforce learning of letters and sounds
Blending and segmenting phonemes to read and spell words
Reading and spelling high frequency words
Reading and writing simple sentences
Responding to stories they have read, by identifying characters, settings, and main events
Retelling stories in their own words
Finding information in non fiction texts
Putting events from stories into the correct order

This programme runs four times a week for 20 minutes and lasts for 16 weeks.

Children who would benefit from this programme are usually identified in upper Key Stage 1 and lower Key Stage 2.

AccelerRead AccelerWrite

This is a multi-sensory approach to learning combining vision, sound and giving children increased self-esteem, motivation and enthusiasm in their own learning. It is three times weekly with each session 20 minutes long. Children use a computer with headphones. They read a sentence then type the sentence. The computer speaks the sentence back to them and children will then complete a visual check. The programme has eight levels of learning starting with simple CVC words such as cat and mum and progressing up to words with consonant clusters such as trouble and fastest.

Bounce Back Phonics

Bounce Back Phonics is a catch up phonics programme for groups of children in Year2, 3 or 4 who may have missed or not fully understood some of the phonics teaching in the Early Years. It is based on Letters and Sounds, which is the phonics programme we use in school.

The units of work are useful for children who are experiencing difficulties with:

blending phonemes for reading and segmenting for spelling;
selecting the correct spelling for long vowel phonemes;
reading and spelling longer words containing adjacent consonants.

Children will take part in 3 lessons a week. The lessons are lively, exciting and full of fun. The length of the programme will depend on the outcomes of an initial assessment.

1st Class @ Number

1stClass@Number is a small group maths intervention we use for children in Year 2 who need additional support to help them catch up and make better progress. A specially trained Learning Support Assistant delivers 24-30 half hour sessions, focusing on number and calculation, and developing children’s mathematical understanding. The sessions are delivered outside of the normal classroom maths lessons.

Toe by Toe

Toe by Toe is a programme designed to support any child who has difficulty in decoding (reading unfamiliar words confidently and accurately) or reading fluently (reading without pausing or hesitating when confronted by an unfamiliar word) to improve their reading skills. It is delivered to individual children. The programme is delivered daily for 20 minutes. It takes approximately five to six months to complete the entire programme.

Fischer Family Trust (FFT Wave 3)

Fischer Family Trust Wave 3 (FFT Wave 3) is an intervention for children who have difficulties learning to read and write. It is aimed at children who need individual rather than small group support. Teaching sessions of between 15 to 20 minutes are delivered daily by a trained Learning Support Assistant for between 10-20 weeks, depending on the child’s needs and progress made during the programme. Each child’s programme is based on the initial assessment. It addresses skills and knowledge at word, sentence and text level. Letter and Word work is always immediately applied to reading or writing continuous text. The aim is for the child to develop a range of independent reading and writing strategies.

Talk Boost

Talk Boost is a targeted programme aimed at children who need help with talking and understanding words, aiming to boost their language skills helping them to catch up with their peers. The programme aims to accelerate children’s progress in language and communication after 8 weeks.

Children who are selected to take part in the programme will attend three sessions per week in small groups, each lasting 30-40 minutes delivered by a learning support assistant. The sessions include activities that follow the areas of language and communication: listen carefully, learning new words, telling stories, working with others and making friends and having conversations. In addition, the teacher will run a weekly whole-class activity and there are activities that can be practiced at home.

Precision Teaching

Precision teaching is a structured teaching method that’s designed to improve the accuracy and fluency of reading, spelling and maths. The main goal of precision teaching is to target and improve specific skills within an intervention such as recalling number bond and times table facts.

Precision teaching is carried out on a one-to-one basis. Each intervention session lasts 10 minutes and takes place daily.

Precision teaching is designed to get learners to think quickly until they’re able to recall the spelling of a certain word almost instinctively. It is fast-paced and repetitive - children will learn to read or spell words until they become fluent and confident.