Reading is the cornerstone of everything we do at St Gregory's. From EYFS to Y6 our curriculum is brought to life through our reading spine, which is bespoke to our school and our values to meet the needs and interests of our children. The adventure never ends at St Gregory's as every year group has the opportunity to enjoy an abundance of stories, non-fiction and poetry.
Please see below our reading policy which explains our bespoke reading curriculum in further detail.
Our reading spine and curriculum are available in school.
At St Gregory's, all children are exposed to high quality texts, which stimulate positive responses to reading, high-quality writing, and purposeful opportunities for Speaking & Listening. In all year groups, these texts are used as a 'hook' into a writing unit and are referred to and enjoyed throughout a study of work.
Our writing curriculum ensures that all children have many opportunities to write for different non-fiction, fiction and poetry purposes. We encourage writing through all curriculum areas and use quality reading resources to model examples of good writing.
The curriculum at St Gregory's builds on prior learning progressively to introduce new knowledge and skills. We are always looking backward to move forwards in our teaching and learning to develop confident writers. To develop this further, we re-visit genres in subsequent year groups. This also supports our moderation within school so we can ensure or expectations are high and consistent across year groups.
We also recognise that children need lots of rich speaking and drama activities, to support their imagination and give them experiences that will equip them to become good writers.
Please see below our writing overview, which shows the texts each year group study and use as stimulus. In-depth overviews showing the progression of knowledge, vocabulary and skills are available in school.
Throughout school, grammar and punctuation is taught to match the writing purpose.
This begins with teaching and consolidating basic sentence structures in Early years and Key Stage One.In Key stage Two, children further develop their understanding of increasingly complex sentence structures, and using the relevant technical terms to be able to discuss and justify the choices they have made when structuring their ideas.
The progression of these objectives are available in our year group writing overviews.
Although grammar and punctuation is taught alongside through our writing curriculum, KS2 are also using the vocabulary ninja resources to support learning. These resources are proving to be useful in pre-teaching, building upon, consolidating and retrieving the grammar and punctuation objectives in prior and current year groups.
Please see an overview below.
To support the teaching of spelling at St Gregory's, we are following the Superhero Spelling programme of work in KS2, which builds on the Monster Phonics programme in KS1.
Children are taught spelling rules in line with national curriculum expectations. This includes the statutory spelling lists, which have been broken down in both our reading and writing curriculums.
Children also regularly use dictionaries and thesaurus to check and improve their work.