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
Teaching and learning in reading is planned to build children’s word reading, and language comprehension, whilst ensuring a love of reading and the necessary wider knowledge to access an increasing breadth of texts and themes.
Explicit teaching of reading domains in reading lessons is then applied more widely across the curriculum, and particularly in writing, lessons which give children access to a wide range of high quality texts as outlined below.
We follow a Mastery approach to English through the programme ‘Pathways to Write.’ Units of work are delivered using high quality texts and children in all year groups are given varied opportunities for writing. Skills are built up through repetition within the units, and children apply these skills in the writing activities provided. Many opportunities for widening children’s vocabulary are given through the Pathways to Write approach and this builds on the extensive work we do in school to provide our children with a rich and varied vocabulary.
You will find the end of year expectations for writing, reading and spoken language for each of our year groups in the attached documents. For further detail on the skills that your children are learning on a termly basis, please contact your class teacher.
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 not 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. If children do not achieve the check at Year 2, intervention continues into Key Stage 2 to support children to secure their phonics knowledge.
Adaptations in English for children with SEND:
The documents below outline some adaptations that teachers could make to support children with SEND within English: