Click here to find out about how we promote a ‘Love of Reading’ throughout school.
The art of communicating through a high level of skill in Speaking, Listening, Reading and Writing is the key to success in all areas of life. At Whinmoor St Paul’s we strive to develop these skills to enable our children to succeed across the curriculum but more importantly in their future lives. Good speaking and listening skills enable children to discuss, debate and effectively put across their ideas to those around them. The ability to read enables a whole world of information and imagination to be opened to our children, whilst writing gives the children a voice to share their ideas with the world.
These pages contain documents and information which will help you get a feel for English in our school and give information about the resources, strategies and schemes of learning we use.
At Whinmoor St Paul’s we have chosen Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised programme as our accredited systematic, synthetic phonics (SSP) programme to teach early reading and spelling. EYFS and KS1 will engage in a daily phonics input. For Nursery, this will focus on Foundations for phonics and in Reception and KS1 will introduce the children to the new phonemes and graphemes needed to begin to blend to read. The phonemes and graphemes are taught in a specific order and a copy of the programme overview for Reception and Year 1 can be found by clicking here.
School uses a Phonics based system of spellings in Years 1 and 2 and Topical Resources spelling scheme from Year 3 to Year 6. These resources include weekly lists and follow-up tasks linked to the new curriculum. Classes are given weekly spelling lists to learn at home. These are supported by teaching in class and KS2 have spelling investigation and sentence homework linked to the weekly spellings.
The core of our reading scheme is based around the Oxford University Press Oxford Reading Tree books. This starts in Foundation Stage with a range of textless books and continues throughout school to Year 6. The books we use include phonetically decodable books as well as those which develop sight vocabulary. There are also books to support reluctant readers and those who need a lower level of challenge but have more mature content. The scheme includes traditional tales from around the world, a range of classic novels and non-fiction books. Foundation Stage and KS1 also use books from the Pearson Bug Club scheme to supplement their phonetically decodable reading books. This is also supported by a range of non-fiction materials from the school library and the Leeds Schools Library service.
Comprehension skills are taught through guided reading sessions, group and whole class lessons. Each class from Year 1 to Year 6 uses the Cracking Comprehension scheme of learning to develop core skills of information retrieval and inference whilst learning question technique.
In addition to take home and guided reading texts, classes study a range of class novels during the year. These texts are carefully chosen to inspire, interest and challenge our children. They link to our class topics and support learning across the curriculum. The texts were carefully selected to ensure progression across school and include a wide range of styles. These range from picture books to classics including Dickens. Details of these texts can be seen on our curriculum pages.
Writing is taught and practiced through discreet units of work teaching the relevant skills needed for each year group. The children are then able to show and develop their abilities through cross-curricular writing. This could be in any other subject of the curriculum including: History, Geography, Science, RE and Maths.
Published writing is assessed half termly against a National Curriculum check list. These published pieces are kept in a ‘writing journey folder’ to celebrate progression over time.
The links on this page give further information and resources to help parents and carers at home. The guidance includes an overview of the letter styles taught in school, both printed and joined.