English
English Curriculum Intent: At St Augustine’s Catholic Primary School, we aim to equip every child with the vocabulary, skills, knowledge and understanding essential to becoming confident communicators, readers and writers. We endeavour to expose the children to a vocabulary rich learning environment and carefully select high quality age appropriate texts to engage and challenge the children with the intent of maximising progress for every child so that they may all fulfil their potential.
We recognise the importance of developing a rich and varied vocabulary for our children, particularly the most disadvantaged, and view this as a platform from which to build essential English skills. To further develop and embed these skills, opportunities for oral rehearsal are sought and high quality texts are selected and used to provide exposure to a range of vocabulary and a developing range of fiction and non-fiction styles. Through immersion in text, we aim to develop a love of books as well as provide engaging and purposeful stimuli for writing to challenge even the most able children.
English Curriculum Implementation: 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 Nursery/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.
As a result, all our children are able to tackle any unfamiliar words as they read. We also model the application of the alphabetic code through phonics in shared reading and writing, both inside and outside of the phonics lesson and across the curriculum. We have a strong focus on language development for our children because we know that speaking and listening are crucial skills for reading and writing in all subjects.
Daily phonics lessons in Reception and Year 1
- We teach phonics for 30 minutes a day. In Reception, we build from 10-minute lessons, with additional daily oral blending games, to the full-length lesson as quickly as possible. Each Friday, we review the week’s teaching to help children become fluent readers.
- Children make a strong start in Reception: teaching begins in Week 2 of the Autumn term.
- We follow the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised expectations of progress:
- Children in Reception are taught to read and spell words using Phase 2 and 3 GPCs, and words with adjacent consonants (Phase 4) with fluency and accuracy.
- Children in Year 1 review Phase 3 and 4 and are taught to read and spell words using Phase 5 GPCs with fluency and accuracy.
Daily Keep-up lessons ensure every child learns to read
- Any child who needs additional practice has daily Keep-up support, taught by a fully trained adult. Keep-up lessons match the structure of class teaching, and use the same procedures, resources and mantras, but in smaller steps with more repetition, so that every child secures their learning.
- We timetable daily phonics lessons for any child in Year 2 or 3 who is not fully fluent at reading or has not passed the Phonics screening check. These children urgently need to catch up, so the gap between themselves and their peers does not widen. We use the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised assessments to identify the gaps in their phonic knowledge and teach to these using the Keep-up resources – at pace.
- If any child in Year 3 to 6 has gaps in their phonic knowledge when reading or writing, we plan phonics ‘catch-up’ lessons to address specific reading/writing gaps. These short, sharp lessons last 10 minutes and take place at least three times a week.
English Curriculum Impact: Phonics
English Curriculum Implementation: Reading
Teaching reading: Reading practice sessions
- We teach children to read through reading practice sessions. These:
- are taught by a fully trained adult to small groups of approximately six children
- use books matched to the children’s secure phonic knowledge using the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised assessments and book matching grids on pages 11–20 of ‘Application of phonics to reading’
- are monitored by the class teacher, who rotates and works with each group on a regular basis.
- Each reading practice session has a clear focus, so that the demands of the session do not overload the children’s working memory. The reading practice sessions have been designed to focus on three key reading skills:
- decoding
- prosody: teaching children to read with understanding and expression
- comprehension: teaching children to understand the text.
- In Reception these sessions start in Week 4. Children who are not yet decoding have daily additional blending practice in small groups, so that they quickly learn to blend and can begin to read books.
In Year 2, we ensure children complete reading the core programme decodable books (up to Phase 5 Set 5). To exit the programme, we complete the final fluency assessment to ensure children can read with adequate speed and accuracy: approximately 60 words per minute with 90%+ accuracy.
Reading in Rapid Catch-up lessons mirrors the core programme. Children following the Rapid Catch-up programme are taught to read using fully decodable books.
- We teach reading to children in Year 2 and above who have exited the core programme using Little Wandle Fluency.
- Each Fluency reading lesson is 25 to 30 minutes. The structure of every lesson is the same:
- A pre-read to practise reading words and to support vocabulary
- Children read aloud for ten minutes and the teacher ‘taps in’ to hear every child read
- Focussed teaching of prosody, repeated reading and comprehension through discussion.
In Key Stage 2, pupils progress to daily shared reading sessions which follow a Mastery approach for the teaching of reading through the programme Pathways to Read. Units of work are delivered using high quality texts and children in all year groups are given varied opportunities for reading.
English Curriculum Impact: Reading
Ensuring reading for pleasure
‘Reading for pleasure is the single most important indicator of a child’s success.’ (OECD 2002)
‘The will influences the skill and vice versa.’ (OECD 2010)
We value reading for pleasure highly and work hard as a school to grow our Reading for Pleasure pedagogy.
- We read to children every day. We choose these books carefully as we want children to experience a wide range of books, including books that reflect the children at our school and our local community as well as books that open windows into other worlds and cultures.
- Every classroom has an inviting book corner that encourages a love for reading. We curate these books and talk about them to entice children to read a wide range of books.
- In Nursery/Reception, children have access to the reading corner every day in their free flow time and the books are continually refreshed.
- Children from Nursery/Reception onwards have a home reading record. The parent/carer records comments to share with the adults in school and the adults will write in this on a regular basis to ensure communication between home and school.
- As the children progress through the school, they are encouraged to write their own comments and keep a list of the books/authors that they have read.
English Curriculum Implementation: Writing
We believe that writing is strengthened by instilling a love of reading within our children. We value the importance of reading to supplement writing, providing a purpose and a context to writing. As such, we take a mastery approach writing through the programme Pathways to Write. This ensures children learn writing skills in a progressive way through emersion in carefully chosen high quality texts that provide a purposeful context for the introduction of this skills based approach.
English Curriculum Impact: Writing
English Curriculum Implementation: Spelling
Discrete spelling sessions are taught from Y2-Y6 in line with the ‘No Nonsense’ Spelling scheme. This is further supported by the use of the Spelling Shed App as an engaging strategy to allow children to rehearse the spelling rules taught both in school and at home as part of weekly spelling homework. In addition to discrete spelling lessons, high expectations of spelling are maintained across the curriculum and spelling journals used from Y2 upwards to support children with their written work.
English Curriculum Impact: Spelling
English Curriculum Implementation: Handwriting
At St Augustine’s School we are very proud of our pupil’s handwriting and take particular care in our handwriting style. We use Letter-join’s on-line handwriting resource and Lesson Planners as the basis of our handwriting policy to ensure we are meeting all the requirements of the National Curriculum.
