We place the highest importance on the successful development of literacy skills. Our curriculum caters for English, teaching the development of reading, writing and speaking and listening is through our topics.

We believe that every child can be a good reader and teach them the skills to be able to achieve this. In addition, we use the VIPERS (an acronym for the skills of Vocabulary, Inference, Prediction, Explanation, Retrieval and Summary / Sequence) to teach reading discretely every day. We encourage the love of reading and regularly undertake Buddy Reading and Paired Reading across the school. We invite families in to school for Family Reading on the last Friday of every month. Our classes enjoy storytime every day. We use a wide range of high quality texts to teach reading and books are leveled using the Oxford Reading Tree system of coloured bands to indicate suitability for different ages. Free readers can choose any texts from class reading shelves or our library. More information about the VIPERS can be found below.

For our earliest readers, we teach Phonics using the Letter and Sounds scheme of work. Phonics is a synthetic system of teaching reading by enabling children to decode the representation of letters (graphemes) into a sound (phoneme) and how to blend sounds together to make words and meaning. Our teaching of Phonics is supported by the use of Big Cat decodable phonics books (published by Collins) in hard copy and e-book format. More information about Letters and Sounds can be found here: Letters and Sounds

We enable our pupils to become fantastic writers by encouraging them to become fantastic storytellers. We believe in the importance of being able to verbally tell a story before being able to write it down. We use a widely recognised system of teaching writing called Talk for Writing which enables pupils to hear, learn and re-enact texts before innovating them with their own ideas to make original versions. More information about Talk for Writing can be found here: Talk for Writing