At St Mary’s Catholic First School we are committed to preparing and inspiring pupils to lead meaningful lives, rooted in the teachings of Christ in our Catholic tradition.

Regardless of their starting point, it is our intention to enable all children to develop the confidence, knowledge and skills to make decisions, to self-evaluate, to make connections and to be lifelong learners, who have been encouraged and enabled to achieve their aspirations and to become compassionate, respectful and responsible citizens.

Our curriculum gives early years teaching staff a powerful phonics teaching tool to ensure that young children are well-placed to read and spell words with fluency and confidence by the time they reach the end of KS1. This is an entitlement we want to achieve for every child.

Phonics Programme: Read Write Inc.

At St. Mary’s we strive to give every child the confidence and skills to become happy, fluent readers, who enjoy reading for pleasure. Reading is the bedrock of the curriculum and therefore we believe in the importance of inspiring lifelong readers, right from the start of their educational journey.  

Phonics is the foundation of this journey, from which a love of reading can develop, and therefore we plan a highly structured programme of daily lessons across Early Years and KS1 but also into KS2 for those children who need such interventions to achieve expected progress in reading.  

We teach through the ‘Read Write Inc.’ systematic and synthetic Phonics programme, from Early Years onwards which ensures children build on their growing knowledge as they move through the school.  

Read Write Inc. is a popular phonics scheme. Like all phonics schemes, it teaches children the sounds in English, the letters that represent them, and how to form the letters when writing.   

We aim for children to be able to apply their phonic knowledge to confidently spell many words either correctly or phonetically using the sounds they have learnt. Children will learn spelling alternatives for different sounds and be able to apply these consistently. Children’s reading books show a cumulative progression in phonic knowledge that match the grapheme-phoneme correspondences they know, giving children support and opportunities to practice their decoding skills. Children are equipped with the tools they need to tackle unfamiliar vocabulary. Staff ensure that an appropriate progression of skills is in place, supporting pupils in knowing more and remembering more phonics knowledge, developing them as both readers and writers. All children progress along their reading journey at a pace that is suited to them, daily teacher assessment and interventions support our learners to be the best readers they can be! 

Reading & Progress-Accelerated Reader (AR)

Here at St. Mary’s we use the Accelerated Reader program to track pupils reading progress in years 2-4 and ensure that they have appropriate library books. Once a child finishes their book, they complete a quiz to demonstrate understanding of what they have read. This tells us that those students who read regularly, and hit their accelerated reader targets, see an improvement in their reading age which is on average 5 months greater than their peers who do not read regularly across the academic year.

Regular reading for all pupils is an essential part of achieving our school mission – ‘We Love, We Learn, We Live’. Our vision of aspiration for each child rooted in achievement and resilience.

As such, we have a regular focus on reading in lessons, have story time each day and run a range of interventions to support students reading. We ask for parents/carers support in encouraging children to read their Accelerated Reader book each day at home. Reading aloud to an adult has been shown to be a highly effective way of developing a students’ ability to read. The following document outlines how staff monitor progress in reading at St. Mary’s.

To find out more about our school curriculum please see the following PowerPoints taken from our most recent parental curriculum workshops or contact the school office to arrange an appointment with the class teacher.