Intent

We ignite a love of literacy for our learners by putting storytelling at the heart of our English curriculum. This gives children the opportunity to develop their ability to listen intently and develop great oral communication skills while mastering the language in order to imitate and innovate the stories that they hear.
They are exposed to texts from around the world with a variety of genres and narratives of diverse compositions. Allowing the children to begin to understand how the audience and purpose affects the language choice of the author.
The stories are also chosen as the centre of the Topic for each year group across a half-term. Each subject is then linked to the chosen topic. This provides further opportunities for the children to have hands-on, meaningful experiences exposing them to a vast amount of rich vocabulary while still having fun. Our constantly developing literacy skills are applied across all areas of our curriculum.
Through systematic, daily phonics teaching we create children who are confident to utilise letters and sounds which form the fundamental building blocks for reading and writing.
We understand that reading opens many doors for children to develop emotionally, intellectually, socially and spiritually. Therefore, we offer our children a wide range of reading opportunities through whole class reading, group reading and individual reading to read for both purpose and pleasure.

How Children Learn to Read in KS1

Learning to read is like building a strong rope made up of lots of smaller strands. Children in KS1 need to learn and practise several different skills at the same time to become confident readers.

These skills include:

• Recognising letters and sounds
• Blending sounds together to read words
• Learning new words (vocabulary)
• Understanding what words and sentences mean

If a child finds one of these areas tricky, it can make reading feel harder overall.

Teachers use a model called Scarborough’s Reading Rope to understand this process better. It helps us see which reading skills a child is developing well and where they may need extra support.

The Reading Rope shows that reading skills are interconnected—they all work together. As children practise them, the strands become stronger and more tightly woven, helping reading become smoother and more enjoyable.

By focusing on these skills early on, we can support children to build strong foundations for reading success now and in the future. For more information, please read the Reading rope explained (available at the bottom of this page).