English

At St Vincent's we aim to promote high standards of literacy through the development of writing skills, spoken language and vocabulary, and a love of literature. We aim to ensure that all children:
 
Read fluently and with good understanding
Develop the habit of reading widely and often both for pleasure and learning
Acquire a wide vocabulary
Develop an understanding of grammatical concepts for reading, writing and speaking
Read a rich variety of texts and develop an understanding of literary heritage
Write clearly, accurately and coherently, adapting language and style in, and for a range of contexts, purposes and audiences
Use discussion to learn; they should be able to elaborate and explain clearly their understanding and ideas
Are confident in speaking and listening, able to make presentations and participate in debate
 
Reading skills are taught through whole class reading so that all reading domain skills are explicitly taught, modelled, practiced and applied.
 
Writing development is rooted in the exploration of high quality texts.  Through these texts, children will learn a progression of grammatical concepts and apply these regularly and widely in their writing. 
 
Phonics
 
Phonics in Reception and Key Stage 1 is taught using Twinkl Phonics. 
 
 
Daily phonics sessions help children to learn the different phonemes (sounds) and graphemes (visual representations) used to build words. 
 
At the end of Year 1, all children are assessed using the Phonics Screening Check to ensure that their phonic knowledge is at the expected level.
 
In order to achieve this check the children must know and be able to use the sounds from Stage 5.  
 
If children do make achieve the check at Year 1, support will be put in place during Year 2, and the Phonics Screening Check is retaken at the end of Year 2.