English

At Shephalbury Park, we intend for our learners to acquire, through high-quality teaching of English, the fundamental skills essential to access knowledge and understanding across the curriculum. We intend for children to confidently communicate their knowledge and ideas effectively using a wide vocabulary. Through immersion in high-quality texts, we hope to instil a love of reading and develop creativity within our learners.

Phonics 

At Shephalbury Park, we follow the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised phonics programme, with children in EYFS and KS1 participating in a daily phonics session. Children in Nursery develop the foundation skills for phonics, with teaching based on Phase 1 of Letters and Sounds.

Children in Reception and KS1 are taught in small groups, accurately matched to their starting points through our half-termly assessments. Children requiring further support participate in additional Little Wandle Keep Up sessions to ensure they make progress. All staff have received training to teach the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised phonics programme.

Reading

Children across the school take part in a daily adult-led guided reading session. In Nursery, children participate in a whole class session, developing their love of reading and understanding of books. As they move into Reception and KS1, children’s guided reading takes place in small groups, using the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised reading books. Across KS2, guided reading is predominantly taught as a whole class with smaller groups receiving additional support where this is required.  

Our early home reading books are all phonetically decodable and matched to the phase of phonics children are currently working at. These are all aligned to the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised progression. As children develop as readers, they move to reading books from the PM scheme which supports them to develop their fluency and prosody alongside their comprehension skills. Children in KS2 learn to retrieve and infer key information, predict and summarise, compare and analyse texts. In KS2, we use VIPERS to focus children on the skills which they are learning. 

Talk for Writing

We use the Talk for Writing approach in our English lessons. Each three-week unit focuses on three distinct areas: In the ‘Imitation’ phase, children develop their speaking and listening skills, explore a model text and identify its key features. In the ‘Innovation’ phase, children unpick the text further, creating a ‘skills toolkit’ which they can use in their own writing. In the final phase, ‘Independent Application’, children create a finished piece of writing based on the model text. Each unit begins with a ‘cold task’ to assess children’s current skills and ends with a ‘hot task’ to assess the progress made in the unit.

Spellings in Reception, Year 1 and Year 2

Every morning, our learners in Reception, Year 1 and Year 2 take part in a phonics and guided reading session, following the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised phonics programme. To complement this learning, every Friday, children take home a word list to practise reading and spelling words with the sounds they have been learning. Children will revisit these words in their phonics session the following Friday to see how many they can recall.

A copy of the spelling lists can be found here. Your child will be given a sticker in their reading record at the start of each half-term to let you know which group they are working in.