English
WRITING
We offer a deep and engaging English curriculum, with real life, meaningful opportunities for writing across different, age-appropriate genres with opportunities to access the written and spoken word in true life contexts as well as nurturing and encouraging creative opportunities, meeting age related requirements of the National Curriculum and allowing the individual to reach their full potential and apply their literacy skills across the broader curriculum. Every child is a writer.
READING
Reading, and developing a love of reading, is paramount at St James. Our well-stocked library, as well as class reading corners, give our children access to a wide variety of texts. We teach Reading weekly during English lessons using the VIPERS approach to directly teach focused comprehension skills. This approach links
directly to the reading domains of the National Curriculum across Key Stages 1 and 2, ensuring that our children are equipped with all the necessary skills to become confident, competent readers. We endorse reading for pleasure at the Academy, believing that good readers make good writers; a successful reader can apply their reading skills in everything that they do.
PHONICS
We use Essential Letters and Sounds phonics scheme to develop our children in the EYFS and KS1, supplying our learners with the solid foundations for word reading and spelling. Children use their phonics skills to plan sentences as their writing skills progress, and reading books are phonetically accessible too. Phonics is a daily lesson, taught in appropriate groupings by ELS trained teachers and TAs, giving our children opportunities to learn tricky words and their phonemes and graphemes. Please click here or see our phonics page for more information on Essential Letters and Sounds.