English

There is an English Team at St Theresa's overseen by Mrs Ryan.  The English Lead and Reading Champion is Miss Mulkeen; she is supported by Mrs Goodwin (Phonics Lead) and Mrs Dowd (Deputy Headteacher). 

Reading Intent Statement

At St Theresa’s, we value reading as a key life skill and are dedicated to enabling our pupils to become lifelong readers. We believe reading is key for academic success and by the end of their time in our school, our ambition is that all children will be able to read fluently, and with confidence, in preparation for their secondary school education and beyond.

We want our children to develop a real love of reading, a good knowledge of a range of authors and be able to understand more about the world in which they live, through the knowledge they gain from books. We intend for them to develop such an enjoyment for reading that they leave as avid readers choosing to read for pleasure and to read to learn. Most importantly, we do not put ceilings on what pupils can achieve in reading and we do not hold pre-conceptions about any child’s ability to make progress.

It is our intention that St Theresa’s is a school which is built on books because we place reading at the heart of everything. We intend that reading will not only strengthen the core knowledge rooted with our writing and wider curriculums but will also play an important role in educating the whole child emotionally, culturally, socially and spiritually.

English:  Reading

Early Reading and Phonics

The development of early reading and phonic progression are critically important for all learners.  To this end we have adopted the Little Wandle Scheme of Work from January 2022. This is one of HM Government's recommended schemes for synthetic phonics and will provide a structured approach to the teaching of phonics as well as reading books matched to pupils' phonic knowledge. 

 Programme-Overview_Reception-and-Year-1-1

Year 2 will continue to follow Little Wandle if children are not secure at Phase 5 or didn't pass the phonics screening in Year 1. 

Reading and Phonics at St Theresa's

LS-Phonics-and-early-reading-policy

 Please click the links below to watch video clips of the correction pronunciation of the sounds taught in Little Wandle.

Phase 2 sounds Reception - Part 1

Phase 2 sounds Reception - Part 2

Phase 3 sounds taught in Reception

Reading at St Theresa's

At St Theresa's we want all our children to be skilled readers by the time they leave primary school. The Little Wandle Scheme is used for the  development of Early Reading until children develop fluency and comprehension beyond the need to decode on a regular basis. Once children are secure at Phase 5 they will move onto the school's book banded reading books. 

From Year 2 upwards we use a system called VIPERS to stimulate reading and develop fluency.  VIPERS texts are selected by staff to expose our young people to high quality texts in class time as well as develop both a love of reading and also an ability to interpret and understand what they have read. 

Children are encouraged to read at home every day.  Little and often is the key.  There is a section in the home/school diary for recording daily reading. There is a section at the rear of the diary that gives parents/carers advice and guidance on how to support their child in developing reading at home. 

We also have access to a virtual library which parents/.carers can access here: 

Virtual Library Resource

English: Writing

Writing is very important in our school and we spend a lot of time writing for various purposes. We use a variety if stimuli for writing including our VIPERS texts (focused texts which can be seen in the long term curriculum map), topic subjects from the driver subjects and other things which can be incidental or come from planning in the moment.  We plan for a varied diet of writing genre and use a range of resources to both assess and moderate the children's work. 

Our writing intent, implementation and assessment document can be read below. 

Writing Progression Document 

Our teaching and learning staff use a 'Writing Progression Document' to identify the variety of genres that should be covered in their year group. It further identifies the learning outcomes for each genre for their year group. 

The document identifies the spelling, punctuation and grammar elements that are covered within each year group. 

Termly Assessment 

Assessment in writing is ongoing as teachers carry out in-depth assessment of children’s writing at the end of each term, and identify the age-related outcomes that have been achieved. Each young person has an assessment document in the front of their books. At the end of the academic year, teachers use their previous assessments across the terms and their professional judgement to tick whether a learning outcome has been achieved overall.

Genre Coverage 

As a school, we ensure that a wide selection of genres is covered in the appropriate year groups. Our teachers have a ‘Writing Progression Document’ which identifies the expected genre coverage for their year group.

World Book Day Celebrations.

We had a wonderful afternoon starting with an assembly to celebrate books and the love of reading and then parents/grandparents came to read stories as a family while our Year 6 children served hot chocolate. We were overwhelmed with the number of adults that attended this event. Thank you everyone for making our World Book Day so special!

March 4th 2022 World Book Day

We celebrated World Book Day today and it was amazing to see the children dressed up as their favourite book characters. Miss Mulkeen led the assemblies and it was a joy to hear the children enthusiastically and eloquently talk about their favourite books. They also paraded their costumes with a twirl and a bow, and two children from each class were awarded a book prize for their imaginative costumes. It was very difficult to choose the winners, but luckily everyone has a book voucher to spend, so all our children are winners!