Vision 

At St Martin’s CE Primary School, we place reading for pleasure at the heart of our English curriculum.

We believe that the first step towards achievement is secure and happy children and this is at the heart of everything that we do. 

Staff at St Martin’s enjoy using high quality texts as the basis of their English lessons. This allows further exposure to excellent authors who can inspire and delight our children.  

We follow a well-planned progression of lessons over the children’s journey through our school. This allows them to master different text types and styles of writing, building on their grammatical knowledge through each year. 

We hold lots of exciting events to improve children’s understanding of English Literature such as sponsored reading, author visits, poetry slams, drama workshops and writing competitions throughout the year. We also develop the children's skills in editing and presenting their work.   

“Writing is thinking.  To write well is to think clearly.  That’s why it’s so hard.” – David McCollough 

Reading 

At St Martin’s CE Primary School, we love reading. It continually informs us and allows learning for life. Therefore, we place reading for pleasure at the heart of our Curriculum and our aim is to create readers for life.

Reading helps children develop skills of literacy, interpretation and expression, but above all, reading brings enjoyment. In order for children to fall in love with reading, we ensure we give them time in school to explore and read new books. Every class shares a book together, every day and during our daily guided reading lessons, we provide a rich selection of high-quality texts.  This is in order to expose our children to a variety of genres and styles and therefore broaden their experience and inspire a love of learning.

“Reading is essential for those who seek to rise above the ordinary” – John Rohn

Reading at home

Our school uses Reading Logs – their books will be changed regularly to ensure progression. Please listen to your child read each week night and sign/write in their Reading Logs. Anybody at home can listen!

We cannot emphasise enough how important this is. Reading at home with your child is an expectation and is essential for them to make the best possible progress. This is the one thing that you can do that will make the biggest difference to your child at school.

The Literacy Trust has some great ideas to help encourage reading.  

Make reading fun with Chase Bank | Words for Life

You could also try audio books.  These are a great way to access stories.  

Although many children can read, word reading and reading comprehension are two different things. While word reading involves translating and decoding text into sounds and spoken words, reading comprehension involves taking what was just read and deriving meaning from those words. In simpler terms, reading comprehension is the ability to read, understand, process and recall what was just read.

Below are some reading questions.  Please feel free to use these when listening to your child read each evening. 

Reading books at school

There is a huge amount of research that shows that children that read for pleasure regularly have higher levels of happiness and academic attainment across a number of subjects, not just reading. To read for pleasure, children first need to learn to read through systematic teaching at school and regular practise at home. Once they have learned the key skills through phonics, then they will be able to venture into a whole world of imagination.

The reading scheme we use is Collins Big Cat for all year groups, which ensures that the texts provided to the children are closely linked to their phonics/reading level. This scheme is linked to our phonics scheme 'Little Wandle' and provides the opportunity to practise the sounds that have been learned in lessons.  

How reading is taught at school

In school, reading is a central priority. As well as daily phonics teaching (including keep-up and catch-up) in EYFS and KS1 (and for those that need it in KS2), we use reading sessions to develop fluency, prosody and background knowledge for comprehension.  There is more information on phonics under the phonics subject.

Reception, Year 1 and Year 2 have reading sessions 3 times per week in small groups of 6.  They are 20 minute sessions and children practice reading fluently and understanding what they have read.

KS2 (years 3-6) have daily reading sessions.  These sessions are as a whole class and are for 30 minutes.  The children also practise reading fluently and work on understanding what they have read.  

Any child in school is who needs extra support with their reading will get that in addition to these reading lessons.  

Writing

Children throughout our school have daily literacy lessons where the focus will be on learning to write well.  This includes helping them to master spelling, punctuation and grammar. They will focus on a range of literature, both fiction and non-fiction exploring important aspects of the text, including characters, settings, features and language. 

Spelling

Spelling helps reading and writing. We teach spellings at school and provide the children with knowledge of spelling rules and a range of strategies to remember spellings. Below is a list of spellings your child should know for each year group : 

You can practise these spellings in a number of ways. Use these strategies to help you learn your spellings: 

Handwriting

We take pride in our handwriting at St Martins where we practise our kinetic letters at least 3 times a week. EYFS and Year 1 focus on letter formation and the sizing of their letters.  Once the children have mastered their joined, neat handwriting style, they can be awarded with a pen licence where they use a blue pen in their work. 

The National Curriculum objectives for English can be found below.