English

Vision Statement

At Elmridge, we believe that reading, writing, and communication are fundamental to the learning journey. Our mission is to equip our pupils with these essential skills, empowering them to use them confidently and effectively throughout their time at school and beyond.

From an early age, we actively promote discussion and encourage pupils to elaborate on their ideas and articulate them clearly to others. Our goal is for every child to develop a strong command of spoken language, enabling them to communicate successfully and confidently in various contexts.

We place great importance on writing and aspire for our pupils to become independent, confident, and inspirational writers. We strive to provide meaningful purposes for writing, making topics engaging, enjoyable, and inspiring for all. Where possible, we utilise high-quality, captivating texts to motivate our pupils, encouraging them to write to the best of their ability and to take ownership of their learning through editing and publishing their work.

At Elmridge, we foster a love for reading, encouraging all pupils to read for pleasure as well as for information. Our phonics programme serves as a gateway for young learners, helping them to recognise the sounds of the alphabet and blend those sounds to read and write words competently. Building on these foundational skills, we equip our pupils with a variety of reading strategies to decode and interpret diverse texts. We are committed to creating a text-rich learning environment that inspires and motivates, nurturing our pupils to become lifelong readers.

Writing

We follow a Mastery approach to English through the programme ‘Pathways to Write.’ Units of work are delivered using high quality texts and children in all year groups are given varied opportunities for writing. Skills are built up through repetition within the units, and children apply these skills in the writing activities provided.  Many opportunities for widening children’s vocabulary are given through the Pathways to Write approach and this builds on the extensive work we do in school to provide our children with a rich and varied vocabulary.  

You will find the end of year expectations for writing, reading and spoken language for each of our year groups below. For further detail on the skills that your children are learning on a termly basis, please contact your class teacher. You can also download more information about our curriculum below as well as extra resources to help your child at home.

Reading

Early Reading & Phonics

At Elmridge Primary School, we believe that all our children can become fluent readers and writers. This is why we teach reading through Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised, which is a systematic and synthetic phonics programme. We start teaching phonics in Nursery and follow the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised progression, which ensures children build on their growing knowledge of the alphabetic code, mastering phonics to read and spell as they move through school.

Reading Key Stage Two

We follow a Mastery approach to English through the programme Pathways to Read from Year 3 to Year 6. Units of work are delivered using high quality texts and children in all year groups are given varied opportunities for reading. Skills are built up through repetition within the units, and children apply these skills in the reading activities provided.  

In KS2, the programme is delivered through whole class shared reading lessons where there is a clear teaching focus with the opportunity to master key reading skills in each session. There are follow on reading tasks to enable pupils to evidence the skills they have mastered independently.

Many opportunities for widening children’s vocabulary are given through the Pathways to Read approach and this builds on the extensive work we do in school to provide our children with a rich and varied vocabulary. Children will practise reading aloud regularly with support from the teacher to build their reading fluency.

You will find the end of year expectations for reading for each of our year groups in the attached documents. For further detail on the skills that your children are learning on a termly basis, please contact your class teacher.

Independent Reading

We are very lucky to be able to offer our pupils a variety of different reading schemes which provide a wide range of appropriate quality texts for children to read covering all genres. The schemes incorporated into our reading provision include: Oxford Reading Tree, Project X, Raintree, Rigby Stars and Ginn Lighthouse. All books are banded in order to ensure progression and challenge for all children. Pupils in KS1 who are still on the phonics phases are given books from the Little Wandle scheme as this supports their phonics learning. Once it is felt that a pupil has reached a level where they are confident, fluent readers, they are able to access a variety of ‘free-read’ texts from class reading areas or from the school library.

Additional resources to help you at home

You can also also access ebooks for tablets to help with reading.