Intent

At St. Richard's Catholic Primary School we encourage our pupils to become lifelong learners. We aim for excellence in all our school activities and encourage all pupils to achieve the best they possibly can. We believe that providing pupils with a well-balanced, enriching and engaging literacy curriculum will aid them in developing into self-assured communicators. Our English curriculum will ensure that all pupils become confident speakers, listeners, readers and writers, preparing them for life in the 21st Century and beyond. 

We aim:

* To ensure that all pupils are receiving a well-balanced, ambitious English curriculum.

* To ensure that each teacher is providing pupils with a consistent approach to English teaching.

* To ensure that all pupils are given the opportunity to extend their knowledge and skills, and

    communicate through spoken and written forms. Through developing their knowledge, skills and

    understanding in English, children learn to appreciate that communication in all forms contributes

    to their wider understanding of the world in which they live.

* To ensure that all pupils are exposed to different purposes for writing and authors through a curriculum that is broad and balanced, relevant and engaging and is differentiated to match the needs and abilities of  all children. 

Implementation 

Reading 

Through our planning and teaching of Reading, we instil a love of reading and an appreciation that through reading, the whole curriculum, and the world, become accessible. Reading is a priority, as it underpins all learning, and is taught in many different ways, which will allow all pupils to become fluent, confident readers. 

To support early reading, we teach Phonics daily in Early Years and Key Stage One. Using the programme 'Song Of Sounds', we plan different lessons and activities to allow the children to become confident in using their sounds to read, with time to identify, practise and apply their learning. 

Writing

Though our planning and teaching of writing, we provide the children with an understanding of writing; purpose and structure. We want the children to enjoy writing and use it as a means of expressing themselves. All our writing is taught through our Imaginative Learning Projects, giving the children a purpose and audience for their writing. 

Handwriting 

Handwriting is taught weekly throughout the school, children are introduced to cursive writing towards the end of reception. The  Continuous Cursive scheme from Twinkl is used from Year 1 to Year 6 to ensure consistency across the school.

Phonics

Systematic synthetic phonics teaches children to read and write by introducing the 42 basic and 17 complex phoneme sounds (phonemes) and their written equivalents (graphemes), blending or synthesising those sounds together to make full words and segmenting them to spell words correctly. 

Key objectives: 
•    Teach the grapheme-phoneme correspondences at a quick pace (around one a day) 
•    Immediately teach how to blend sounds into complete words for reading. (eg the phonemes /c/  /a/ /t/ blend together to make the word ‘cat’
•    Immediately teach how to segment words into their individual phonemes for writing.  (eg the word ‘bus’ segments into the phonemes /b/ /u/ /s/
•    Teach key irregular words (tricky words) 
•    Use decodable texts to ensure children apply phonics knowledge to read at an age-appropriate level. 

The programme is based around a song (links below) which embeds Grapheme-phoneme correspondence, matching each phoneme with its written equivalent, a picture and corresponding action.  Parents can offer invaluable support by reinforcing the work children do in the classroom, by singing the song together. 

Children work their way through 3 stages of the programme as they move through EYFS and Key stage 1.  

For more on the Song of Sounds programme the website https://www.songofsounds.co.uk/ has lots of information, as well as tips on how to help at home.