English

Reading & Phonics                                                        

In our school we believe that reading is the key to unlocking the wider curriculum. We use the Red Rose Letters and Sounds phonics programme to ensure children develop their phonic skills in a coherent and systematic way. There is direct teaching of phonics using this programme from Early Years upwards.   Children who are still developing their phonic knowledge take home a phonically decodable book matched closely to the phonic knowledge they have acquired each week.  It is one of our school priorities to ensure that all children develop confidence in applying their phonic knowledge to enable them to become confident readers and writers. We greatly appreciate parental support in this area and encourage parents to listen to their child reading the phonically decodable books regularly. 

Our Phonics Teaching Sequence

Lancashire Red Rose Letters and Sounds

Lancashire Red Rose Letters and Sounds is a new systematic, synthetic phonics planning
programme using the Letters and Sounds approach titled Red Rose Letters and Sounds. This planning programme has been developed, continuously evaluated and refined over several years, using the expertise of effective classroom practitioners and phonics experts at LPDS. The programme includes planning from Phase 2 to Phase 5 with specific daily sessions and a very rigorous approach to meet, and exceed, expectations based on the Early Learning Goals and the National Curriculum for Year One.

Lancashire Red Rose Letters and Sounds is not a DFE validated program. This has given us the freedom to be able to choose the best publishers for each of the phonics phases as well as being able to promote our cursive handwriting policy. If you would like to read Lancashire's reasons for not validating their program, please see below.

Writing                                                                           

At Kirkland & Catterall St Helen's CE Primary School, we ensure that the teaching of writing is purposeful, robust and shows clear progression for all children. In line with the National Curriculum, each year group teaches the explicit grammar, punctuation and spelling objectives required for each age group. As well as teaching the objectives, teachers are able to embed the skills throughout the year in cross-curricular writing opportunities.

Please click on the link below to see how children develop their understanding of sentence construction, grammar and punctuation through school.

Handwriting

Our handwriting scheme begins with basic letter formation in pre-school with children in reception building to pre-cursive. We aim for all children to be using cursive handwriting by the end of year 1.