English at Kirkstall Valley
Here at Kirkstall Valley Primary School, English is a core subject and is embedded across the curriculum as one of our 'underpinning threads'. English is an integral part of everyday life and is a skill which is essential to children's development and will help enhance their learning in all areas of the curriculum and the wider world.
English skills (such as communicating effectively in speech and in writing; listening with understanding and becoming responsive and enthusiastic readers) are essential as they encompass all areas of learning. This is why we encourage a cross-curricular approach to the teaching of English wherever this is appropriate, to provide meaningful learning contexts for the children.
At Kirkstall Valley, we aim to encourage children's love of English- their interest in learning new words, their passion for reading, their enthusiasm for writing, and their confidence in speaking to others. We aim for children to become readers and writers who can use their skills confidently and successfully to achieve well in all areas of learning.
At Kirkstall Valley, we initially teaching reading and spelling through a synthetic phonics programme. We use 'Letters and Sounds' for this in Foundation, Years 1 and 2, and catch-up phonics intervention in KS2. In Foundation, the 'Letters and Sounds' programme is used alongside the accompanying Jolly Phonics actions and songs.
In Year 2 and Key Stage 2 we also use No Nonsense Spelling, alongside resources from 'Spelling Shed'.
Throughout school, we use a wide variety of real books and texts for Guided and Shared Reading (alongside other published resources, including Reading Explorers, Rigby Star and Rigby Star Plus, Super Phonics, First News, Rigby Navigator, Rigby Navigator Non-Fiction and Rigby Navigator Max).
For children's individual reading books that they bring home each day, we follow the Book Band System. More information on this can be found below. In our Book Band boxes, children can choose a variety of different fiction, non-fiction and poetry books from various different reading schemes. To see a comprehensive list of the reading schemes we use, please click here.
For more information about our Book Band System, please look at our 'Reading Snake' and our Book Band Information.
All of the children at Kirkstall Valley also visit the school library once a week with their class where they can borrow a book to bring home.
Information about expectations for Reading, Writing and Maths for each year group
