English
At the Crescent we are passionate about all our children becoming independent and enthusiastic readers, writers and spellers. Our Intent is to foster the love of reading by exposing pupils to a wide range of quality texts. The teacher’s enthusiasm for reading is one of the most important things that they do in their classroom. It has a positive effect on reading achievement and the life-long love of reading.
As readers we encourage children to predict, retrieve, infer and summarise. We do this by weaving reading throughout the entire curriculum.
CUSP Reading is deliberately designed to be ambitious and aspirational, ensuring that every child leaves our school as a competent, confident reader. Drawing on the latest research around explicit vocabulary instruction, reading fluency and key comprehension strategies, this curriculum is a synthesis of what we know works in helping children make outstanding progress in reading and a distillation into consistent, well-structured practice.
Pupils will receive a daily diet of excellent reading teaching and this will be supplemented by regular opportunities to engage with shared reading experiences, promoting the joy of reading with the whole school community. The clear structure and principles ensure that teaching is progressive, challenging and engaging and the rich, diverse literature spine acts as both a mirror so that every child can see themselves in the core texts and as a mirror to engage pupils with experiences beyond their own field of reference.
Phonics provides the foundation for this and we use The Little Wandle programme to enable children to read easily, fluently and with good understanding. At The Crescent Primary School Phonics in the Early Years is taught on a daily basis and follows the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds programme. Children are taught the skills for segmenting and blending words and are introduced to new phonemes as part of a systematic synthetic approach. The teaching of Phonics continues in Years 1 and 2 as children are introduced to alternative graphemes, lesser known sounds and begin to learn some of the more complicated spelling rules.
At the Crescent, we understand that writing is an essential part of the curriculum. Writing is taught through the use of high-quality texts. We’re ambitious about what children can achieve and we strive to create exciting and stimulating opportunities for all children. We aim to ensure that all children leave our school with a passion for writing and a high level of English knowledge and skills that they can apply in a variety of subjects and situations.
CUSP Writing
We follow the CUSP Curriculum for Writing. Expert subject knowledge is carefully woven into each Writing module which gives teachers the opportunity to teach and rehearse key knowledge and skills before applying this learning to meaningful extended outcomes. The careful architecture of this curriculum ensures that pupils build on prior learning and maximise purposeful curriculum connections to become writers for life. Within the CUSP curriculum, punctuation and grammar is taught both directly and discreetly with pupils receiving a daily SPaG lesson. CUSP Writing also draws on taught content from the depth study of core texts from the literature spine.
Cross-curricular Opportunities
The skills that children are taught in Literacy underpin all other subjects. They enable pupils to communicate and express themselves in all areas of their work. Teachers will always make cross-curricular links wherever appropriate and will plan for pupils to apply the skills, knowledge and understanding that they have acquired during Literacy to other areas of the curriculum.
Spelling, punctuation and grammar
A good spelling programme gradually builds pupils’ spelling vocabulary therefore, as our Crescent children progress from Year 2 and enter Key Stage 2, they will have discreet spelling lessons three times per week. During these lessons children will be taught to understand the rules and principles underpinning word construction and patterns, recognise how to apply these principles in their writing and develop the skills for proof reading. These spellings are further explored and practised in the homework set weekly. In Year 6 children are required to take a 'Spelling, Punctuation and Grammar’ test. Children are prepared for this test as they build throughout the year groups with progressive punctuation structures in writing and grammatically correct cohesive sentence formations are explored within the context of daily writing opportunities. This level of knowldege is expected to be applied to all curriculum areas as key priority .
Phonics
Research shows that teaching Phonics in a structured and systematic way is the most effective way of teaching young children to read. Almost all children who receive good teaching of Phonics will learn the skills they need to decifer new and unfamiliar words. At The Crescent Primary School Phonics in the Early Years is taught on a daily basis and follows the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds programme. Children are taught the skills for segmenting and blending words and are introduced to new phonemes as part of a systematic synthetic approach. The teaching of Phonics continues in Years 1 and 2 as children are introduced to alternative graphemes, lesser known sounds and begin to learn some of the more complicated spelling rules. At the end of Year 1 children are required to sit the Phonics Screening Check to assess their ability to segment and blend words. Children are presented with 40 words – a mixture of real and pseudo words and they are expected to apply their Phonics knowledge to read the words. If children are unsuccessful in Year 1 they have the opportunity to retake the test in Year 2. Intervention groups are set up for those children who require more support in their phonics learning and this additional support will continue in Key Stage 2 if necessary.
Drama and role play
At The Crescent Primary School we strongly believe that the more experiences children have the better writers they become. We therefore place a strong emphasis on bringing drama and role play into our English lessons, allowing the children to recreate those fantasy worlds that they so often read about. Hotseating, teacher in role and freeze frames are just some examples of the types of activities your children will experience through our diverse literacy curriculum.
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