Phonics and reading

At All Saints’ we know how important it is to develop a love of reading. We do lots of things to make reading enjoyable!

In Reception and Year 1 we teach early reading skills through the ‘Read, Write Inc’ scheme. When children are ready to read books with words, they begin reading from our reading scheme books. Children begin their reading journey on red books and progress through the colours until they are fluent enough to be a free reader. We also encourage children to read books from home and the local library.

Each class reads for at least 10 minutes each day. We try and make this as fun as possible by sometimes sitting under our tables, taking our shoes off or listening to music!

Each year group has its own class text, linked to their topic which the teacher reads from regularly.

We have a reading challenge where children are rewarded for reading at home, certificates are given out during our weekly celebration assembly.

To encourage a bit of competition, we also record how much each year group is reading each week. The winning year group in each key stage wins a non-uniform day at the end of the half term!

We are also very proud of our reading journals and encourage the children to draw pictures in them related to the books they are reading.

Handwriting

As a school, we have a cursive writing policy where children learn to write in the format below. Here is a guide to our cursive writing so you can help to support your child at home. This method of forming letters makes it easier for your child to begin joining when they are ready! If there are any questions about our policy, please speak to your class teacher.

Maths

At All Saints', we use the White Rose Maths curriculum. This follows a fluency, reasoning and problem solving approach with allows all pupils to deepen and broaden their knowledge of all topics. Within each topic, pupils are exposed to concrete resources and then look at visual representations in order to finally understand each abstract concept. Using this pedagogy, our pupils become deep, critical thinkers with key transferable skills.

Times tables are a fundamental part of the primary maths curriculum. Once they have been mastered, our pupils are able to problem solve with the four operations, fractions, algebra and more! We therefore work hard to build times tables fluency throughout the year groups. In Reception and Year 1, we work on building the key maths skills such as subitising, doubling and halving. Once pupils reach Year 2, they are then ready to take on the Superhero challenges!

A great way for our pupils to practise these challenges is the 1 Minute Maths White Rose App. This is a free app to download to any device and allows pupils to practise from Reception to Year 6.