We’ve got a range of different support schemes available.

• Little Wandle, whole class phonics teaching.
• No Nonsense Spelling: Y2 – Y6
• No Nonsense Grammar: Y1 – Y6
• Basic skills curriculum
• Letter-Join: supporting the teaching of handwriting skills.
• Our wider curricum: supporting the writing development within foundation subjects.

Nursery and reception children work with a variety of activities that improve their fine motor control (their ability to control the small muscles in their hands). These activities range from tasks that require the children to use tools such as tweezers to move objects, to more complex tracing of patterns.

From reception, all the way to year 6 we form letters in the same way. Using a cursive font, we ensure our handwriting style is consistently used in lesson resources. This cohesive approach, reinforces our handwriting policy throughout our curriculum.

Reception start with cursive style handwriting, that’s unjoined. Their letters start and end with a cursive flick. Moving up to year 1, these letters are then joined, using the familiar letters as a starting point and are continued up to year 6.

Handwriting is taught alongside spellings, with at least ten minutes of daily focus.

Throughout school, we use the new, revised Little Wandle Letters and Sounds approach.

Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised is a complete systematic synthetic phonics programme (SSP) developed for schools by schools. Based on the original Letters and Sounds, but extensively revised to provide a complete teaching programme meeting all the expectations of the National Curriculum and preparing your children to go beyond the expectations of the Phonics Screening Check.

Every day, early years and KS1 take part in discrete, whole class phonics sessions. These follow a defined teaching sequence of phonemes.

For children who join us, we provide an initial assessment of their phonic decoding ability. Once children achieve a good grasp of decoding, we move the focus to using phonics into writing, such as spelling.

“Stand up for your right to read”

Our reading slogan.

Quality literature is at the core of our English curriculum.

Alice in Wonderland, Wind in the Willows, Treasure Island and other such classic texts are offset with modern texts such as Trash by Andy Mulligan, Orion and the Dark by Emma Yarlett and The Nowhere Emporium by Ross Mackenzie. Our personalised programme uses quality texts such as these throughout.

Check out our Reading Spines
 

Entry Points

Using stimulating entry points, we begin our journey into the exploration of the story as well as the author. Each topic begins with an exciting event that relates to the writing. Such as going on a hunt for the Enormous Crocodile or a pirate day for Peter Pan.
 

Reading

Each day, children carry out individual reading, guided reading and shared reading of a story. We use our shared stories as the content of a class presentation, which our children present at the end of every half term.

Creative Writing

Working together, we decode these exciting stories. We look at the language used and the meaning of words. Our children are engrossed in these wonderful stories, which they then imitate in the style of that author, in their own creative writing.

Assessment Exemplifications

Keeping up to the needs of our children, we’re always evaluating. We use examples from the government (KS1 Writing Exemplification and KS2 Writing Exemplification) which illustrate what being ‘at the expected standard,’ would look like at the end of KS1 and at the end of KS2. In response to these key stage 1 has a particular focus on character descriptions, narratives, fairy tales and recounts to really get the children interested in writing. In key stage 2 there is still a huge focus on narrative and story writing such as horror, suspense and fables whilst also developing grammatical structures further such as paragraphing. We also develop skills in debating, persuasion and autobiographical.

We love celebrating our children’s achievements. English Superstars are our awards for children who have really pushed themselves to improve. We’re always finding new ways to encourage and promote progression. Our current awards are for reading, writing, progression from pencil to pen, and more able.

Higher Achievers are children who surpass our expectations and require a little more challenge in their work. We love celebrating the dedication these children show. Author Experience Days, special visitor and Spelling Bees are just some of the special events we host throughout the year, to challenge and encourage our more able learners.