English at St Paul's

It is our intention when teaching the English curriculum that our pupils acquire the necessary knowledge, skills and understanding to become lifelong learners and linguists. We strive to ensure that all our pupils receive a well-rounded learning experience when reading, writing, speaking and listening, which will equip them with the fundamental tools to achieve at St Paul’s and beyond. It is our intention to immerse pupils in the wonders of quality texts, to instil a love for reading, a passion for discovery and a confidence to explore their imagination through our book-led curriculum.

Teaching Writing 

To raise standards in the teaching of writing, we implement The Write Stuff approach. The Write Stuff’s systems enables teachers to teach the mechanics of writing explicitly. TWS influences how teachers sequence learning with a more practical approach to writing. This approach embeds a whole school approach by providing supportive structures for pupils to map out their writing and capture the process visually.

As part of TWS approach, all children are introduced to the Writing Rainbow. The Writing Rainbow is organised into three zones writing. The three zones help to teach sentence structure and different grammatical structures step by step by chunking a piece of writing and modelling each part.

The Teaching of Phonics

At the early stages of reading, the children are taught to decode texts by following a synthetics phonics programme (Letters and Sounds). At St. Paul’s, reading is taught alongside Letters and Sounds initially. This promotes a strong and systematic emphasis on the teaching of synthetic phonics to aid the teaching and learning of reading. Pupils also take home reading books to support home learning and promote the important partnership between school and home. It is important that children learn 'pure sounds' when starting on their phonic journeys (see link below for information).

Teaching Reading 

At St. Paul’s children are explicitly taught the skills of reading (outlined in the National Curriculum and the KS1 and KS2 test domains) through the use of VIPERS, which were created by Rob Smith (The Literacy Shed) The Reading Vipers can be used both in KS1 and KS2 with a little adaptation.

V ocabulary 

I nfer 

P redict

E xplain

R etrieve

S ummarise/ sequence