We are clear about the Intent of our Reading Curriculum:

To ensure that EVERY child becomes a reader by the time that they leave St Philip’s Primary School.

By the end of Reception, all children have secured phase 4 sounds and are blending them to read CVC words.

By the time children leave year 1, all children have secured early reading skills based on phonic decoding and have completed the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised programme.

By the time children leave year 2, they are reading with automaticity and understanding.

By the end of year 6, children will have been exposed to a wide range of authors and texts so that by the time that they leave us, they are competent readers who can recommend books to their peers, have a thirst for reading a range of genres and participate in discussions about books.

Children will move on to secondary education, reading with fluency, accuracy and understanding, with the resilience and confidence to tackle unfamiliar texts.

Our intent, throughout their time with us at St Philip’s is to promote and instil a love for reading, with children of all ages who share enjoyment and a passion for literature.

Every child a reader.

We are clear about the Intent of our Writing Curriculum:

To ensure every child becomes a writer and confident speaker by the time that they leave St Philip’s Primary School so that they are able to communicate effectively their thoughts and feelings.

In recognition of the context of many of our children, to broaden language used and to develop a rich vocabulary.

In recognition of the context of many of our children, to ensure grammatical accuracy in spoken and written language.

To link reading and writing, to remove potential barriers so that ALL pupils have literary experiences and a context for writing.

By the time pupils leave St Philip’s, they will have secured their basic skills in handwriting, punctuation and spelling.

They will be able to structure and organise their writing to suit the genre they are writing and include a variety of sentence structures and writing techniques to include detail or description.

Our intent, throughout their time with us at St Philip’s is to promote and instil a love for writing, with children of all ages who share enjoyment and a passion for literature and recognise themselves as authors.

Every child a writer.

St Philip’s ‘Little Free Library’ 

As part of our commitment to nurture our children’s love of reading we have decided to open a ‘Little Free Library’ for parents which will be situated by the main gate as you leave to exit school by the front entrance. It is so important for our children to see adults as readers and, with the closure of local libraries, we want to support you in accessing free books to share, read and enjoy, so please, please, do help yourselves to a book to read.

The children have been told that this Free Little Library is not for them and they are not to access the books inside as they are for mums and dads and nans/ grandads etc.

Please bear with us as we collect further reading materials in the coming weeks. (If it is empty one day… try again another day! It is exciting to peek inside to see what is there! ) We are currently building up our supply to widen the range of books and to include more which may appeal to men. Seeing men as readers is so vital for our children to ensure that our boys thrive as readers and see reading as something they aspire to.

After two years of disrupted education, I urge you to read with your children every day. We can see the huge difference it makes to the progress your children make in every subject throughout the curriculum. We can teach the mechanics of reading and immerse the children in wonderful stories, but the practising of reading at home is so vital that it cannot be underestimated. 10 minutes a night will have a huge impact on your child’s progress in reading, especially if you show your excitement about how well they are doing….and that will impact their future.

If our children can read confidently, with understanding, they can achieve all they need to do in the world…. But they can also do so much more… They can transport themselves across time to the past or the future, across the world and into other worlds, through cultures and histories, through the wonders of maths and science and the universe, through the struggles of what it is to be human and how we can change our world for the better. Being a reader really is a precious gift.