English
Phonics
At St. Thomas’s CE Primary School, we are passionate about ensuring all children become confident and enthusiastic readers and writers. Phonics provides the foundations of learning to make the development into fluent reading and writing easier. Through daily, high quality phonics teaching, children learn to blend sounds to read words and segment words to support spelling.
To allow our children to develop a strong phonic awareness and effective blending and decoding skills, we have chosen to follow the ‘Supersonic Phonic Friends’ scheme, which is on the approved list of validated systematic synthetic phonic programmes. Our children work through phases starting from phase one within preschool settings, quickly moving on to ‘Securing the Basics’ as soon as the children start school in Reception through to teaching the spelling rules from the National Curriculum in Year Two.
We passionately believe that teaching children to read and write independently is one of the core purposes of a primary school enabling them to access a broad and exciting curriculum and ensuring they flourish as learners throughout their time at our school and beyond. These fundamental skills not only hold the keys to the rest of the curriculum but also have a huge impact on children’s ability to function within society as adult readers and writers.
Reading
“To learn to read is to light a fire” - Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
Our aim is to create a reading school. We will ensure that our children will confidently read for pleasure as well as critically read, in order to further their independent learning.
They will achieve this by:
- Being introduced to stimulating stories which they will learn to retell.
- Learning to read using a phonics first approach.
- Being taught using quality, stimulating and challenging texts written by a range of authors.
- Having independent access to and enjoying a wide variety of further quality and stimulating texts of different genre and written by a wide variety of authors.
- Becoming independent, critical, life-long readers and learners.
- Reading for pleasure.
Our children will:
- Read for enjoyment, with confidence, fluency, accuracy and expression.
- Employ a full range of reading cues – phonic, graphic, visual and contextual to make sense of their own reading.
- Read a wide range of fiction, poetry and non-fiction books.
- Evaluate and justify their preferences.
- Develop an appropriate technical vocabulary through which to understand and discuss their reading, evaluate and justify their preferences.
- Develop reading skills in conjunction with those of writing, so that they may function in society, as literate adults and readers for life.
Key Stage Two Reading Spine
Writing
“You can make anything by writing.” C.S. Lewis
Our aim is to create an enjoyment and understanding of the power of writing in our children. We will ensure that our children will develop the skills of a writer within the genres of fiction, non-fiction and poetry. We will inspire this through our reading rich curriculum and environment supported by our ‘Talk for Writing’ approach.
Throughout their school journey, they will be taught a wide bank of stories and text which will help them to build and inspire their own writing.
They will achieve this by:
- Being introduced to stimulating stories which they will learn to retell and reinvent.
- Being taught using quality, stimulating and challenging texts written by a range of authors.
- Having independent access to and enjoying a wide variety of further quality and stimulating texts of different genre and written by a wide variety of authors.
- Being taught the spelling, grammar and punctuation skills used by writers.
- Providing real writing opportunities for a specific audience.
- Becoming independent, critical, life-long readers, writers and learners.
- Reading and writing for pleasure.
Our children will:
- Write for enjoyment, with confidence fluency and accuracy.
- Use talk to stimulate, plan, share and refine ideas and writing.
- Employ a full range of spelling, grammar and punctuation skills within their writing.
- Write a wide range of fiction, poetry and non-fiction texts.
- Evaluate and redraft their writing.
- Develop a wide range of interesting and engaging vocabulary, through which they will engage the reader, using reading as a stimulus.
- Develop reading skills in conjunction with those of writing, so that they may function in society, as literate adults and writers for life.
