Our English Curriculum
At St. Chad’s, we believe that every child should have the opportunity to develop a lifelong love of books, and that every child is a flourishing author.
'You can make anything by writing' - CS Lewis
Our aim is to create fluent readers, confident speakers and willing writers. We use the Read Write Inc. programme to enable our children to get started on their reading and writing journey. We blend this approach with Talk Through Stories as we move from reception into Year 1. Once our children achieve phonics mastery and reading fluency, we then progress to Pathways to Read and Pathways to Write, which our children access all the way from the final term in Year 1 to Year 6.
What is Read Write Inc?
Read Write Inc. Phonics is a comprehensive literacy programme, weaving decoding, comprehension, writing and spelling together seamlessly. Fidelity to the teaching programme, rigorous assessment, tracking and one-to-one tutoring ensure that schools guarantee progress for every child.
Once children become confident and fluent readers, they progress onto the St. Chad's reading and writing curriculum (built around Pathways to Write and Pathways to Read), which covers all aspects of the National Curriculum for English and is steeped in high quality texts which reflect a diverse range of cultures and viewpoints.
Want to know more about Read Write Inc?
For information and tutorials on how to support your child learning to read go to:
English in Key Stage 2 (Yr 3 - Yr6)
We follow a Mastery approach for the teaching of reading through the programme Pathways to Read. Units of work are delivered using high quality texts and children in all year groups are given varied opportunities for reading. Knowledge and skills are built up through repetition within the units, and children apply these in the reading activities provided.
We deliver a minimum of three whole class shared reading lessons per week from years 3-6 with grouped reading for every pupil at least once a week as well as individual reading time. In our whole class reading sessions, there is a clear teaching focus with the opportunity to master key reading skills in each session. There are follow on reading tasks to enable pupils to evidence the skills they have mastered independently.
Many opportunities for widening children’s vocabulary are given through the Pathways to Read approach and this builds on the extensive work we do in school to provide our children with a rich and varied vocabulary from EYFS onwards.
We also use Pathways to Write to drive our writing curriculum. This aligns with Pathways to Read ensuring meaningful links for our pupils with texts and topics that are used across Literacy, Humanities and Science.
We also use the Read Write Inc. Spellings programme to support our pupils progression from phonics to comfident, creative writers. This is delivered daily through short but succinct sessions. During this time pupils also have opportunity to practice their handwriting skills.