“Let us remember: one book, one pen, one child, and one teacher can change the world.”—Malala Yousafzai
Malala Yousafzai is a Pakistani female education activist and the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize laureate at the age of 17. She is the youngest Nobel Prize laureate in history, the second Pakistani and the only Pashtun to receive a Nobel Prize.activist and author.
English at St Thomas'
At St Thomas’, we are committed to fostering a love of reading and writing for all our pupils. Our English curriculum is designed to develop the core literacy skills in speaking, listening, reading and writing, and our pupils are supported, guided and enabled to become confident, articulate, and imaginative communicators in a variety of contexts and across the full curriculum, not just in their English lessons. We believe that literacy is the cornerstone of all learning, and we ensure that every child develops well and leaves our school with these important skills gained through our curriculum offer.
English Curriculum
Our English Curriculum is wide and varied and pupils will be taught to read and write with confidence, fluency and understanding. We base our English lessons on the Literacy Tree Schemes of Work. We selected this as it uses high-quality, diverse texts which stimulate children’s interest and are thought provoking with opportunities for adventure, developing knowledge and empathy, whilst ensuring that children are exposed to a very wide variety of genres and quality authors. Our English curriculum enables a comprehensive and thematic approach to teaching English, integrating reading, writing, and oracy. The children develop their literacy skills, building on prior knowledge and ensuring continuity and progression from one year to the next. In addition to reading and writing, these rich texts offer many opportunities for developing the spoken language through debate, drama and discussion using the issues raised through, and within, the texts.
Everybody reads at St Thomas’
We pride ourselves on developing our children as competent and confident readers. Our pupils will be able to read well. They are encouraged and supported to have a keen interest in books and reading and we aim that all learn to read quickly and are supported to read to learn and read for pleasure in and beyond school. This work enables children to develop a growing vocabulary and learn new words. Through our reading curriculum and provision they are able to access and read a range of text types and genres, and write in a variety of styles and forms.
Phonics at St Thomas’
As children start in their early steps when learning to read, we use the Essential Letters and Sounds (ELS) phonics program to provide systematic, synthetic phonics instruction that is clear, consistent, and rigorous. We aim for all children to ‘keep up - not catch up’ and so we identify and support children who require additional help early on, ensuring no child is left behind. Our daily teaching of phonics is clear and consistent, and we ensure that children can use their phonics skills in context so that they see themselves developing as both readers and writers. We integrate phonics teaching with reading and writing activities, showing children the practical application of their phonics knowledge. Very regular assessment is used to help us to monitor children’s progress and we provide targeted interventions where needed. Please see our dedicated phonics page for further details.
At St. Thomas, our English curriculum is not just about learning to read and write but about developing a deep and lasting appreciation for the power of language. By integrating the Literacy Tree and ELS phonics, we create a vibrant and challenging literacy environment that prepares our pupils very well for the challenges and opportunities of the future.
Take a look at our learning in English
Children at St Thomas' are inspired to read and write by visiting authors. We enjoy author workshops that share how characters, settings and plots are created.
We love reading!
We read with our class buddies, we read with our family, we read to each other, we read to our community, we read to our teachers and we read to our volunteers.
We foster a love of reading by having books at the centre of our learning. We have a whole school book swaps on World Book Day. We have a new exciting book delivered each month from our local book shop. We have brand new books across school for our independent readers. We win books as prizes and we have 'best book' voting competitions.
Children at St Thomas' get the opportunity to write with purpose and in a range of genres. We celebrate writing as a whole school. We want children to write for pleasure, to feel confident about writing and to have the knowledge and skills to take them beyond Primary School and into their next phase of school life.
Our classrooms all have English working walls. The children are taught how to use them to be independent with their writing and to find what they need to write for that text type. In Autumn Year Two had found there had been a giant in their room! The excitement was palpable!
Our writing skills are used across the curriculum. We write in many different ways e.g. instructions, non-chronological reports, make leaflets, write poetry, playscripts and recounts in subjects such as Science, History, Geography and RE.