Withyham - St Michael's Primary School

Pupils at Withyham, St Michael’s Primary School engage in learning using a range of fiction, non-fiction and poetry texts, which provide excellent writing opportunities each term.

We offer a skills-based writing curriculum, which means that the main focus within a lesson are the progressive writing skills identified in the National Curriculum. Alongside this, the children learn about the different language and layout features of each genre studied. 

Our texts are chosen by the English subject lead in collaboration with the class teachers. These have been carefully selected to link well with our history, geography, science curriculum topics, and to reflect British cultural diversity. These texts provide rich reading and writing opportunities as well as broader subject enrichment. From the very beginning, our youngest children learn that writing is purposeful and something they can all do. In Years 1 - Year 6 children learn to write at length to inform, to entertain, to persuade, and to argue. These are skilfully taught by class teachers ensuring that our children become confident communicators and writers. The writing opportunities are inclusive and flexible and meet the needs of all of our children and the cohorts. 

We use Letter- join handwriting resources 

 At Withyham St Michael’s we aim to enable all its learners to develop confident word reading and comprehension. Our aim is to support readers to read easily, fluently and with good understanding. To develop the habit of reading widely and often, for both pleasure and information and acquire a wide vocabulary, an understanding of grammar and knowledge of linguistic conventions for reading, writing and spoken language.

In order to do this, we teach the National Curriculum Programme of study which consists of two dimensions

• Word reading, including phonics for the early teaching of reading
• Comprehension skills (both listening and reading)

We use the Little Wandle Phonics scheme in Reception and Year 1 and 2.  We have bought in Little Wandle Catch Up materials for children aged 7+.  Reading is the gateway to lifelong learning so we aim to ensure all children leave St Michael's as confident and fluent readers. Children are assessed regularly so gaps in knowledge are identified and closed.

Once children are secure in their phonic knowledge, we assess children at key learning points using the York Assessment of Reading Comprehension.  This tells us if children have a good phonic understanding, rate of reading and that they have understood what they have read. 

In Years R-1, learners participate in regular guided reading lessons led by their class teachers. They are taught to read with accuracy and prosody. Our wonderful selection of Big Cats picture books are carefully aligned with Little Wandle's phonic scheme ensuring incremental and progressive developmental steps in reading.

In Years 2-6, teachers listen to children read regularly and use assessment to align pupil's reading ability to a suitable banded book which is taken home. Reading is carefully monitored as we believe all children should read daily to make good progress. 

Our guided reading lessons are planned by their teachers around a core text with a focus on developing reading comprehension skills as well as prosody. We use VIPERS for comprehension. This is an acronym to aid the recall of the 6 reading domains as part of the UK’s reading curriculum.  They are the key areas which we feel children need to know and understand in order to improve their comprehension of texts. VIPERS stands for:

Vocabulary

Inference

Prediction

Explanation

Retrieval

Sequence or Summarise

The 6 domains focus on the comprehension aspect of reading and not the mechanics: decoding, fluency. 

Fluency is developed through our teaching strategies: modelling- echo reading, paired reading, text-marking, and pre-teaching new vocabulary.