Reading
'If reading is breathing in then writing is breathing out'. This expresses what we believe is the fundamental relationship between the two aspects of our English curriculum. Children at St Mary's begin their learning journey in English by using systematic synthetic phonics to decode texts and continue through the key stages acquiring the skills to retrieve and infer information from more and more complex texts.
This being said, we consider the most important aspect of our reading curriculum is to foster a love of books so we plan the children's learning carefully around a range of high quality texts and our classrooms all feature inviting reading areas which encourage children to read.
Writing
The skills of good writers are many and varied. Pupils need to learn to use good grammatical structures as well as a coherent legible script and the rules of spelling in English. They also need to be inspired to write for a range of audiences and purposes.
We use high quality texts to set high expectations for pupils and encourage pupils to talk about their ideas and rehearse their writing. Children learn from carefully modelled 'chunks' of writing that demonstrate increasingly complex language structures and devices.