We prioritise reading in our curriculum. The teaching of reading in the Early Years and Key Stage 1 focuses on the quality teaching of systematic, synthetic phonics to enable children to become confident, fluent readers. We make rigorous and systematic use of the Essential Letters and Sounds programme, which has been validated by the DfE. The teaching of reading in Key Stage 2 is facilitated through whole class reading lessons. Some of these lessons enable children to immerse themselves within their class texts, developing their understanding of language, characters, plots and themes. Some of these lessons provide children with the opportunity to explore a variety of short extracts, focusing on the development of reading fluency and the development of language comprehension through thoughtful questioning and discussion using the V.I.P.E.R.S approach. In Key Stage 2, to help foster independent reading for pleasure, we are introducing Accelerated Reader. All of the above, alongside daily story time sessions, enable our children to see themselves in the books they read, learn about others and the wider world and step into the shoes of characters and the worlds they live in.

Through our book-based curriculum, mapped to children’s progressive skills, we expose children to high quality, diverse literature that feeds their imagination and inspires them as writers. We place a strong emphasis on sentence construction, ensuring our children build strong foundations from which whole text composition can be built upon. Our writing units and projects enable the whole class to come together and learn how to write for a range of purposes and audiences. We explicitly teach children how to read as writers and coach them through each stage of the writing process.