Intent

At St. Clare’s it is our intention to produce a lively and stimulating language environment in which staff are committed to teaching individual, group, and class activities, which promote rich and appropriate speaking, listening, reading, and writing experiences whilst valuing and celebrating diversity in culture and language.

Having previously been a ‘Power of Reading School’, we have adapted our reading and writing approaches to incorporate ‘Talk for Writing’ principles alongside Literacy Counts, creating an inspiring reading and writing curriculum. The children are provided with opportunities to explore and practise a range of genres from EYFS to Year 6.

 Literacy skills open a world of academic success for children and we understand the importance of language in our children’s lives. We recognise that English is a core subject within the National Curriculum and essential for educational and social progress. Mastery over language empowers children to communicate creatively and imaginatively, as well as allowing them engagement with the world at large. Therefore, we aim to establish a curriculum which provides the necessary meaningful opportunities to develop competence in all language areas. The desire to embed and consolidate Literacy skills is reflected across our wider curriculum.  Confidence in basic language skills enables children to communicate creatively and imaginatively, preparing them for their future journey through education and beyond.

Implementation

At St. Clare’s, children are given daily opportunities to explore and develop their reading, writing and oracy skills through a number of rich, engaging and creative activities in order to prepare them for the world they live in.
We understand that children need to be able to listen to and recall genres orally before writing their own, which is we use the ‘Read to Write’ teaching resources by Literacy Counts as the basis of our English planning from EYFS to Year 6.  It incorporates reading, writing, vocabulary and GPS skills through the teaching of high-quality texts each half term.

It is our aim to encourage children to learn to love reading and to read regularly in school and at home. We strive to ensure children can communicate clearly in written form and become masters of language. We promote reading throughout our curriculum and children are given opportunities to develop their reading skills every day.

We teach children at St. Clare’s to write using a cursive script from the beginning of their time here. We know that using a cursive script helps most children become more confident, fluent writers and helps improve spelling. We believe that good presentation skills are important as we want children to value their own work and for others to do the same.
We understand the importance of writing and language in our lives and we are committed to ensuring we do our absolute best to help the children in our care become creative writers and successful readers.

Impact

We strive to ensure that our children's attainment is in line with or exceeds their potential based on their varied starting points and that children will make good progress in Reading, Writing, and Speaking and Listening. We measure this using a range of assessment materials and methods, whilst always considering the age-related expectations for each year group. We intend the impact of our English curriculum will ensure our pupils are academically prepared for life beyond primary school and throughout their educational journey. Literacy at St. Clare's means not only to read, write, speak, and listen, but also to use language to learn, think, and communicate effectively.

World Book Day

A CELEBRATION OF READING

During March schools all over the world celebrate World Book Day.

Here at St. Clare's there is a great tradition and much anticipation about our annual celebration of reading, books, stories and characters. This year was no exception! So many children and staff participated in dressing up in a costume of a character from their favourite book or story. The creativity and ingenuity that some families have never fails to amaze us!

Our assembly was awash with interesting and amazing characters; some old, some new, some instantly recognisable others not so.

This stimulates a love of reading and a thirst to find out more about books and characters, which in turn fosters pleasure in reading, which is vital in today's technological world.

David Mason, an author and poet came to entertain the children with his stories and poems. He worked with some year groups to write and perform their own poems.

We even had a Roald Dahl themed menu, designed by the children in Year 6.

Power of Reading whole school writing display

Volunteer Readers

We are delighted to have a willing group of volunteers who come to school each week to read with our children. These volunteers include: parents, retired staff members and ex-pupils. They are a valuable asset to the children as they provide one-to-one reading time and discussion about characters and themes. We are so grateful to them all for their time and dedication. If you have a spare morning or afternoon and would like to share your love of reading with our children, please approach Mrs Pilkington or speak to the office staff.