Reading

Our English curriculum is centred around high-quality texts carefully chosen to provide a range of learning opportunities. We believe literature should offer both windows and mirrors into the human experience - texts that reflect the children’s lives and those that open their eyes to the wider world.

Each half term, children focus on one text (or a series of linked texts) in guided reading. This provides them with the opportunity to develop their vocabulary, improve the fluency of their reading, and understand texts at a deeper level.

We allow the text to lead the lessons, so there is not a prescribed sequence to the sessions; some books require more vocabulary work than others, while others need a greater focus on discussion. Our teachers expertly decide what the children need to successfully understand what they are reading.

From Nursery onwards, we use a linguistic phonics approach to teaching reading and spelling through the Sounds-Write programme.

Children learn four key concepts:
• Letters are symbols that represent sounds
• Sounds can be spelled using one, two, three, or four letters
• The same sound can be spelled in different ways
• The same spelling can represent different sounds

Through lessons that focus on segmenting, blending, and phoneme manipulation, children learn code knowledge and apply it in whole words from the very beginning. With a focus on what the children can hear, all pupils are able to participate fully.

In Years 4–6, children continue to use the Sounds-Write approach to support their spelling, building on earlier work and extending this to polysyllabic words.