With love and faith, we aspire and achieve
At St Matthew's, we believe that writing is the window for children to show and share their ideas from across the curriculum and from their growing understanding of their wider world.
To support this, we use a clear systematic approach to the teaching of writing. We have worked closely with other DGAT schools to develop an approach which ensures that we develop exciting and engaging learning experiences for our children so they can develop their skills to be excellent writers and authors.
Writing is often centred around broad themes linked to class topics to excite and engage the children. All classes use a two weekly approach to writing with one week focusing on key skills and knowledge while the second week embeds these using different genres.
Role play, discussion and debate is often used to enrich the writing experience. Teachers regularly model writing to demonstrate the approaches for different genres and expectations, as well as embedding their targets, which the children call their T’s.
In EYFS and Year 1, our approach is adapted to take into account our commitment to child-initiated play and the different structures of the teaching day. To support reading and writing there are key text in the provision as well as opportunities for writing in all Learning Through Play or Continuous Provision activities.
Pupils with SEND and those who need additional help are supported through scaffolded support in lessons, regular interventions and catch-up support as well as 1-2-1 support as needed. On occasion, children may be taught a bespoke curriculum to support individual need.
Teachers assess pupil's knowledge and skill development as they go, using live marking in lessons. Composite written tasks help the children to pull together their learnt knowledge of the genres and T’s into more independent pieces of work. Progress is frequently assessed throughout the term and interventions are put in place to ensure that children keep up.
Writing in English is celebrated and often represented on displays or in topic books.
At St Matthew’s, reading is front and central to all learning. We see reading as the most important foundation we can give children to support them in their learning.
Phonics is taught daily from the very start of Reception and continues throughout Year 1. To support our teaching, we follow the Essential Letters and Sounds phonics scheme. Through this, we introduce children to a new sound daily with lots of opportunities for rehearsal. We look at sounds on their own, within words and as part of sentences. Phonics teaching is then rehearsed throughout other opportunities throughout the day and within the classroom environments and the children’s play.
From Year 2 onwards, we teach reading using the VIPERS skills. This is where we take individual reading skills including: vocabulary, inference, prediction, explanation, retrieval and summarising. Each day, we focus on teaching and rehearsing one of these skills before combining them to explore texts at a deeper level.
All of our teaching of reading is supported through carefully chosen, high-quality texts that excite and inspire the reading, whilst also modelling how to be an amazing reader.
We are currently developing our school library with a newly decorated space and lots of lovely new books. This will have a grand opening by a local author as part of our extended World Book Day celebrations.
At St Matthew’s, we foster a culture of reading for pleasure. Reading is a powerful tool that allows children to experience new things, develop new interests and calm their minds. Due to this, reading is at the centre of all that we do at St Matthew’s. This means that children are encouraged to love books, seek out authors they enjoy, read widely and discuss their reading. Within each class, the children have daily opportunities to read and explore texts, as well as a well-loved story time session where the teacher reads aloud to the children.
Throughout the year, we also aim to include reading events which help to engage children and maintain their interest in reading. These include special events, such as World Book Day and Reading for Good, as well opportunities such as the Scholastic book fayre to explore new texts. Our library has recently been updated and refreshed with lots of new books purchased.