English
Our English curriculum is built around the National Curriculum, key skills and the identified needs of our learners. We pride ourselves on providing an inspiring, engaging and meaningful curriculum that enables children to reach the highest academic standards, nurtures a love of literature and language and enables them to succeed throughout their lives.
Reading
We believe that reading is an essential life skill therefore we want our children to enjoy and value the importance of every reading experience and express a passion for reading.
Implementation
- Reading is a focus throughout day. Children are involved in reading opportunities during English activities and guided reading activities, plus they use reading to access other areas of the curriculum and every year group shares a class text.
- Children have access to high quality texts that support the curriculum and widen their text choices.
- EYFS / Year 1 follow a systematic synthetic phonics programme (Little Wandle) and use phonetically decodable books. Years 2 to 6 use a rich and varied reading scheme plus additional texts to continue to support this good practice.
- A whole school guided reading sequence is followed for consistency, which incorporates opportunities to develop cultural capital, vocabulary and inference, prediction, explanation, retrieval and summary skills.
- Reading experiences are valued and shared with enthusiasm.
- Oracy is embedded through providing opportunities to develop these skills across the curriculum.
- Modelling is used to support and extend reading skills including decoding skills, automaticity and prosody.
- Home reading is monitored weekly and termly.
- Book fairs and other celebrations of books are held to promote a joy of reading
Phonics
We believe that all our children can become fluent readers and writers. This is why we teach reading through Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised, which is a systematic and synthetic phonics programme. We start teaching phonics in Reception and follow the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised progression, which ensures children build on their growing knowledge of the alphabetic code, mastering phonics to read and spell as they move through school.
Guided Reading
We use a whole school guided reading sequence for consistency, which is bespoke to our school and the needs of our learners. During these sessions, opportunities are provided for whole class, group, paired and independent reading. The sequence focusses on developing vocabulary, inference, prediction, explanation, retrieval and summary skills as well as focussing on text structure. Cultural capital is promoted through text selections and discussions around these. High quality texts are used to expose every child to greater vocabulary and wider content, to broaden children’s experiences and to ensure appropriate challenge is provided.
Reading Scheme
In Early Years Foundation Stage and Key Stage 1, we use a reading scheme, which supports children with their phonics and reading skills both in school and at home. In Key Stage 2, we continue to follow a levelled reading scheme which ensures that children read books that support and develop their reading ability. Once children have achieved the national reading expected level for Key Stage 2, children become ‘free-readers’.
Writing
We believe that writing is an important life skill for communication therefore we want our children to value the importance and creativity of writing and engage fully in this process.
Implementation
- Grammar, spelling and vocabulary skills are explicitly taught across all year groups.
- Meaningful writing opportunities are provided across a range of genres, where children can apply key skills.
- High quality texts are used that inspire and motivate children.
- There is a clear purpose and audience for every piece of writing.
- Modelling is used to support and extend writing skills.
- A whole school writing sequence is followed for consistency, which incorporates opportunities to model, orally rehearse, plan, apply, act, talk, revise and edit.
- A range of resources are used to aid learning of all abilities.
- High quality presentation is expected across all written recordings.
- Links are made, where possible, between everyday reading and writing opportunities and our creative curriculum.
Spelling
Throughout the school, spelling is taught weekly and then monitored through application within writing. Children initially use their phonetic skills to spell words whilst beginning to learn Common Exception Words. Spelling rules and patterns are taught in line with the national curriculum
Download: Essential Spellings Parents Workshop 2022
Download: Spelling Activities
Children in the Early Years Foundation Stage follow a separate curriculum.