Our Reading Curriculum
At St. Mary’s, we are committed to fostering confident communicators who excel as fluent readers and writers. Our English curriculum is enriched with oracy and language, providing children with the skills they need for their educational journey. We nurture a love for literature, encourage pleasure in reading, and use books as a gateway to explore knowledge across the broader curriculum.
Phonics and Early Reading
We follow the Department for Education (DfE) validated ‘Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised’ scheme, which offers a clear and structured pathway to reading. Phonics is taught discretely and daily, with all staff adhering to the programme’s principles.
Our approach ensures children read books carefully matched to their phonics knowledge and common exception words. This alignment enables early reading success, building confidence and fluency. Re-reading and discussing books with their teacher reinforces decoding skills, while high-quality shared texts promote reading for pleasure.
Reading for Pleasure
Creating a love of reading is at the heart of our curriculum:
- Each class enjoys a dedicated read-aloud time, where teachers share challenging, high-quality texts with the class.
- Our book-rich reading environments offer children access to an array of inspiring books.
- Once children complete the phonics programme, they explore our 100 Recommended Reads—a curated list from Peter’s—to encourage reading for breadth and depth.
Our School Library, a welcoming and cosy space, is central to our school community. Families are invited to explore the library together, and children can borrow books to take home and enjoy.
Writing Links
We use Pathways to Write to align our writing curriculum with Pathways to Read. This creates meaningful connections between texts, topics, and subjects such as Literacy, Humanities, and Science.
If you have further questions about our reading curriculum or want details about termly skills, please contact your child’s class teacher. You can also find the end-of-year expectations for reading for each year group in the attached documents.
Guided Reading Y2-Y6
We follow a Mastery approach to English through the programme Pathways to Read. Units of work are delivered using high quality texts and children in all year groups are given varied opportunities for reading. Skills are built up through repetition within the units, and children apply these skills in the reading activities provided.
In KS2, the programme is delivered through whole class shared reading lessons. In Y2, children participate in one whole class lesson followed by bespoke grouped reading at least once a week as well as individual reading. For pupils still needing support with phonics from years 2-6, we provide an individual reading programme that has phonically decodable texts at the heart of it. In our whole class reading, there is a clear teaching focus with the opportunity to master key reading skills in each session. There are follow on reading tasks to enable pupils to evidence the skills they have mastered independently.
Many opportunities for widening children’s vocabulary are given through the Pathways to Read approach and this builds on the extensive work we do in school to provide our children with a rich and varied vocabulary. Children will practise reading aloud regularly with support from the teacher to build their reading fluency.
You will find the end of year expectations for reading for each of our year groups in the attached documents. For further detail on the skills that your children are learning on a termly basis, please contact your class teacher.
Vocabulary and Skills Development
Expanding vocabulary is integral to our approach. The Pathways to Read programme enhances this work by embedding vocabulary-building opportunities into each lesson. Reading skills are taught, practiced, and mastered through repetition, with follow-up tasks allowing pupils to independently demonstrate their learning.
We also use VIPERS (Vocabulary, Inference, Prediction, Explanation, Retrieval, and Sequence/Summarise) as a framework, ensuring children meet National Curriculum objectives while becoming confident, skilled readers.
Our Writing Curriculum
We use the Pathways to Writing Scheme for our teaching and learning. The units, for use with pupils from EYFS to year 6, provide clear detailed lesson plans and resources, linked to high-quality texts to ensure engaging and purposeful English lessons. Each unit of work incorporates teaching strategies designed to engage and challenge writers
This dovetails and is underpinned by our Trust's ‘How we teach’ pedagogical approach based on Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction.
Key elements of Pathways to Spell
We follow a mastery approach to the teaching of spelling through the programme ‘Pathways to Spell’. It is a programme designed to deliver the statutory content of the Primary National Curriculum for spelling in key stages 1 and 2. Through weekly teaching of spelling objectives and development of a whole school approach to word transcription, vocabulary development and proof-reading, the programme aims to develop children as proficient spellers.
You will find the end of year expectations for spelling for each of our year groups in the attached documents. For further detail on the skills that your children are learning on a weekly basis, please contact your class teacher.