English
At Holy Cross we aim to foster a love of reading and writing through a vast array of opportunities, designed to engage, excite and develop our children. We aim to develop pupils' abilities within an integrated program of phonics, reading and writing. Pupils will be given opportunities to interrelate the requirements of English with a broad and balanced approach to teaching of English across the curriculum, with opportunities to consolidate and reinforce taught literacy skills in a variety of subjects.
Children receive English teaching daily and this is structured to incorporate a wide range of reading, writing, spelling, word and sentence level work and differentiated independent activities to practice, secure and extend skills. English topics are based on high quality texts in a range of genres. Children are given time to immerse themselves in the range of poetry, fiction and non-fiction texts, getting to know the characters, settings and genre specific formats.
We are passionate about providing our children with high quality, cross curricular texts on which we focus our English teaching. We choose high quality texts, with high-level vocabulary and then interlink Pie Corbett’s ‘Talk for Writing’ ideas into our schemes of work.
Read Write Inc lessons are provided to EYFS and Key Stage One for the teaching of Phonics and as an intervention within Key Stage Two. The RWInc Spelling programme is used to teach spelling across Key Stage Two.