Aim

At St William of York we aim to provide an English curriculum that engages, excites and inspires pupils in their journeys as readers and writers. We engender a love of reading, writing and oracy through the use of high-quality texts and a range of different stimuli. The English curriculum is centred around a focus book and these books are representative of our diverse community. We have a strong emphasis on developing speaking and listening skills by planning vocabulary-rich sequences of learning.

Reading

To teach early reading, we use a systematic synthetic phonics programme called Read Write Inc. Phonics. This is an evidence-based, structured approach to teaching children to read. This method of reading helps children to learn the relationships between the sounds (phonemes) of spoken language and the letter symbols (graphemes) of the written language. More information about our phonics teaching can be found here. 

In Key Stage Two, we teach reading comprehension skills through Guided Reading. These lessons are planned using a scheme called Literary Leaves. During these sessions, the class reads a whole-class text and the pupils focus on a particular reading skill each day. These reading skills include:

• Retrieval
• Prediction
• Summary
• Inference
• Word choice
• Language

Writing

As a school, we have designed the writing curriculum around texts recommended by the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education (CLPE); this ensures that texts are high-quality and representative of the diversity in our school community. We use the Literacy Tree scheme of learning to guide our planning and teaching. This ensures clear progression of skills and coverage of a range of different writing genres. 

Because of this, the pupils at St William of York enjoy their English curriculum, engage well with their class texts and become confident readers and writers. They develop a love of reading and a good understanding of the purpose of writing. We are committed to supporting all learners from their individual starting points and ensuring that pupils are well-prepared for each stage of their learning journey. 

You can find out more about the core texts that we use in each year group in the document below. You can also find the Power Point presentations for our reading and writing parent workshops.