English

Reading

At St Joseph’s we love books and a walk around the school will quickly show how we aim to inspire and nurture a love of reading. Books are easily accessible, valued and prized and staff are knowledgeable about children’s literature. We encourage children to challenge themselves, helping them to make informed choices about what they read.

To give the children the skills they need to become fluent and confident readers, the school focuses on the teaching of phonics through the Sounds-Write approach.

Reading skills are taught from Key Stage one with lessons that include the key reading domains (retrieval, inference, vocabulary, author choice, compare and contrast, summarise and prediction). Across the school, every class receives daily guided reading sessions, either as small groups or as a whole class as they progress through the years. Guided reading offers an opportunity to develop and practise reading skills whilst engaging with a variety of texts.

Underpinning our whole class teaching of reading is the St Joseph’s Reading Spine: 35 quality fiction texts and novels which we believe children need to experience before they leave us. Each text is studied in depth alongside quality poetry and non-fiction texts. We teach children the skills they need to be great readers, give them the knowledge they need in order to understand what they read and provide them with the opportunity to make links across their learning and respond with their views.

Teachers read a ‘class reader’ book to children daily. The books are carefully selected to enable engagement for all and quality discussion.

Reading

Writing

At St Joseph’s we provide opportunities for the children to write with confidence and see themselves as a writer. We want to inspire our children to be the best writers they can be. We recognise the importance of nurturing a culture where children take pride in their writing, can write clearly, accurately and adapt their language and style for a range of contexts. We follow The Write Stuff from Reception through to Year 6. The Write Stuff is the work of the teacher, author and education consultant Jane Considine.

Acquisition of language is of vital importance to us at St Joseph’s and throughout writing lessons we aim to support children in widening their vocabulary, so they are able to use language that inspires them. 

More about The Write Stuff:

The Write Stuff brings clarity to the mechanics of writing and provides clear systems through which to focus the writer’s attention. The combination of fiction and non-fiction units we have carefully selected to follow provide children throughout their journey with the experience of a wide range of high-quality texts and authors. In our lesson’s teachers follow a repeated pattern of ‘Initiate’, ‘Model’ and ‘Enable’ whereby they use the three zones of writing to provide a consistent whole school systematic approach to writing carefully constructed sentences.

The Fantastics offer 9 lenses with which to structure ideas and target children’s thinking. This supports children in developing variety in their writing by focussing on the vocabulary used, initiating ideas, provoking thoughts and igniting imaginations. 

The Grammaristics focus on the importance of accurate grammar where tools are taught and used immediately to help children develop fascination around language so that they can manipulate and carefully structure words into sentences

The Boomtastics focus on the art of writing, using a range of literary devices and techniques to make careful choices, playing with language to add flair to our writing and achieve various intentional impacts on our reader, painting vivid pictures through our word choices.

Picture of child working/writing

At St Joseph’s we aim for ALL our children to become confident, fluent writers who are able to use the wide range of writing tools they have accessed and developed whilst on their writing journey with us.