IMPLEMENTATION
At St Vincent’s Catholic Primary School, we strive to ensure that every child becomes a capable reader, writer and speaker, and that they are able to use the skills gained from English lessons across the wider school curriculum. English lessons at St Vincent’s continuously consolidate students’ previous learning and build on their knowledge to further their ability in reading and writing, thus improving their understanding and utilisation of spelling, punctuation, grammar and vocabulary.
All children are encouraged throughout their time at the school to read for pleasure with access to a wide range of diverse, high quality, engaging texts, as well as using our reading scheme that links with our phonics teaching to hone and develop their reading skills. From Reception to Year 2 children are taught phonics using the Read Write Inc DfE validated scheme, aiding them in their personal growth by teaching them how to segment and blend sounds and phonics teaching continues into KS2. Children are heard reading by staff on both an individual and group basis, while our regular reading sessions cover a wide variety of fiction and non-fiction texts to further develop comprehension skills. We look for parents and carers to support children’s learning, following clear guidance and expectations about reading at home. To support this, we organize annual sessions on phonics to assist parents and carers with supporting their child’s learning outside of school.
We help children to develop their writing skills to ensure they have the ability and stamina to write across a range of subjects, topics and genres with regular opportunities to write at length. We use The Literacy Tree scheme as a foundation for our writing due to its high quality, diverse book-based approach. This ensures consistency throughout the school and a wide coverage of various written outcomes. Handwriting sessions are frequently used as a way of developing the stamina and skills required to produce children’s best work. We use Letter-join as our handwriting scheme throughout the school with children learning printed letters and then moving to joined handwriting. We provide a wide range of activities to support children in writing independently and a variety of exciting opportunities across the curriculum to write with purpose. We encourage all our children to consider themselves writers, authors and poets, and to develop the confidence to share their linguistic creativity with their peers.
With English at the heart of all our teaching, lessons are taught in a cross-curricular way, ensuring that the English curriculum supports learning across all subjects. Children are encouraged to develop their spoken language skills by learning to speak clearly, to convey their ideas to their peers confidently, and to ask insightful questions by being responsive listeners. By ensuring that all subjects in all year groups seek to expand children’s vocabulary, we encourage children to express their ideas in progressively more expansive work and to show their personalities through their written work.
'When there are enough books available that could act as mirrors and windows for all our children, they will see that we can celebrate both our differences and our similarities, because together they are what make us all human. '
Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop