English is a huge part of the curriculum and at St James' Junior School we use Literacy Tree to foster a love of reading and writing across the school. We teach every aspect of English through literature that inspires. We focus on diverse stories, important themes and immersive classroom experiences, which are all brought together in one whole-school curriculum. We work hard to ensure that our English teaching is fun, engaging and, where possible, linked to our wider curriculum topics. 

Reading

At St James' Juniors we understand that reading fluently is a key life skill and is the foundation for children's future success. We strive to foster a lifelong love of reading by promoting reading for pleasure and creating a culture where children choose to read for enjoyment. We teach reading through a text approach and enhance reading comprehension with sequenced activities that guide children through whole books, creating critical readers. These resources centre around novels, poetry collections, and high-quality non-fiction books.

As a school, we also use Accelerated Reader. We use it to track pupils' reading levels, ensuring they are reading books at an appropriate level and also as motivation. Pupils read books and then take a quiz. If they receive 100% on their quiz, they're entered in to a weekly prize draw to win a book. 

Early Reading

Our school is using Little Wandle Letters and Sounds as our systematic, synthetic phonics (SSP) programme to support pupils not currently reading at age-related expectations. The Rapid Catch-Up programme has a fast pace, so the children can access the curriculum and enjoy reading as soon as possible. The catch-up sessions are taught daily to small groups of children. These sessions begin with recapping phonics - focusing on reading and spelling. This then progresses on to the fluency section of the programme, with a key focus on reading longer texts and comprehension exercises. If your child is part of a Little Wandle group in our school, you can find more information about the sessions on the attached power point and documents in the files section.

Writing

Writing is also taught through a text approach. Our book-based planning sequences for writing, provide comprehensive coverage, engaging children to write with a clear audience and purpose.

Spelling

Staff use Spelling Shed https://www.spellingshed.com/en-gb/ to plan and deliver weekly lessons based on the spelling patterns for their year group. The pupils also have access to Spelling Shed at home where they practise the weekly spellings set by the teacher in prepartaion for their weekly test on Fridays. We teach vocabulary in context through investigation and application, consider word origins, etymology, and synonyms, helping children familiarise themselves with the vocabulary they’ll encounter within their class text. 

Grammar and punctuation

Grammar and punctuation is embedded within our English curriculum. Objectives for each year group are taught within the Literacy Tree units of work.