At St Helen’s CE Primary, we follow ‘Ready Steady Write’ for our English writing curriculum which places quality literature at its core. Each half term children are immersed into a new text which will teach age appropriate writing skills and inspire their own fiction, non- fiction and poetry pieces of writing.

Systematic daily phonics teaching is a key element of our approach to the teaching of early reading. ‘Little Wandle’ is used to teach phonics from Reception to Year 1 as a whole class teaching tool and as required, in Y2 -Y6 through small group teaching and ‘keep up’ interventions. Children are grouped according to the phonics phase that they are working at and a well paced session, that is multi-sensory, is delivered daily for 20-25 minutes a day. Teachers demonstrate and encourage children to apply phonic blending and segmenting as one of the strategies for reading, during guided reading sessions. All children are encouraged to independently apply the phonics skills taught to their reading and writing. Phonics displays and corresponding table resources will be prominent in the Reception and Year 1 class.

From year 2 up to year 6, children will be taught reading skills, reading techniques and reading strategies via daily whole class reading sessions. These sessions are based around Reading VIPERS (vocabulary, inference, prediction, explanation, retrieval and summarise) the English content domain strands for reading.

The Reading Spine at St Helen’s CE Primary has been developed to engage children in a range of genres, themes and interests. This comprises of new and exciting literature and classics enabling them to explore a vast range literary material that will enrich their vocabulary, reading skills and imagination. These books are available in classrooms in ‘Beloved Books’ boxes and are separate to class libraries. Time is built in daily for teachers to read to the class.

Class libraries are in each classroom and will inspire the children to want to choose a text and sit and read. They will install a love of books and reading. The children can access them daily. It is the teacher’s overall responsibility to ensure all books in their class library are appropriate for the age of their children. Children also have timetabled access to the main school library each week.