English

Our English curriculum is aimed at inspiring pupils and building a love of literature, through the use of high quality texts as stimuli for writing.  The skills of phonics, spelling and grammar are woven through our curriculum and taught in context, ensuring that pupils develop these necessary skills and can apply them across all areas of the curriculum.  

Pupils engage in daily English lessons, which will focus around a text, building up skills through a journey of reading, writing and editing, to produce high quality work that they are proud of.  All year groups have opportunities to write for a variety of purposes and audiences throughout the year, and also to showcase their writing through publishing their work in different formats.

Writing is explicitly linked to the work done in the wider curriculum through different topics, meaning that pupils develop their competency through cross curricular written work, where the same high expectations are employed.

Our Reading curriculum is varied, and compromises of whole class, small group and individual teaching of reading, through the use of high quality and age appropriate fiction and non-fiction texts. Skills of blending and segmenting are taught from Reception, developing decoding and sight recognition to build fluency in reading.  Comprehension skills are taught in conjunction with fluency skills, teaching pupils the strategies to understand what they have read and to use model texts to support their writing.  We believe that by building fluency and comprehension successfully in our pupils, we are enabling them to gain enjoyment from reading.

Pupils are introduced to a range of authors and poets throughout their time at St Michael and St Thomas, allowing them to find their personal preferences and develop a love of books.  Each year groups studies key authors and genres, to give pupils a varied experience of both modern and classic texts, challenging them through new vocabulary and texts structures.

We have high expectations of pupils and ask that parents support this with our ‘5 times a week’ reading rule as part of pupils’ homework.

Phonics is taught through our Read Write Inc scheme from Reception, and continued throughout Y1 and Y2.  Children who have not exited the programme by the end of KS1, will continue to receive small group intervention in KS2.  The robust teaching of phonics is continued and complemented in KS2 by a rigorous spelling strategy that is implemented throughout the week, supported by home learning and online challenges.

For details about specific year group coverage, see the curriculum map for each year group, found on the class pages of our website.