Our writing curriculum is designed to provide a broad and balanced education that meets the needs of all children. We follow the award-winning Ready Steady Write from Literacy Counts to develop confident, independent and successful writers with high aspirations.
Our writing curriculum is research-informed and impact-proven, carefully designed to support all children to master the foundational skills and write for a clear audience and purpose.
Through the use of high-quality, vocabulary-rich texts, we provide exciting and meaningful reasons to write. Children are immersed in literature and taught to craft their writing with precision, using a range of pedagogical approaches, including sentence accuracy, modelled writing and shared writing, as well as regular opportunities for editing.
We value spoken language as a foundation for writing. Through structured talk, drama and vocabulary exploration, children learn how to organise and express their ideas clearly before writing them down. Our aim is for every child – regardless of need – to write fluently and take pride in their work. We want our pupils to leave primary school as enthusiastic writers, ready for the next stage of their education.
Reading
At Underhill School we want our children to love reading and this is at the heart of our reading curriculum. We want all our children to be enthusiastic readers who read widely and frequently and take true pleasure in reading.
You can find out more about how to support children with reading by speaking to your child's class teacher and there's is lots of information on the Reading Planet Parent Hub: https://www.risingstars-uk.com/subjects/parents/parent-hub/reading-with-your-child
Early reading
Our reading journey starts with systematic teaching of phonics : direct, focused phonics is taught every day in Reception and Key Stage 1. We use a scheme called Rocket Phonics which provides an ambitious framework for teaching of phonics.
As soon as children have learned new sounds, they start to read decodable Target Practice books. They provide focused practice of newly learned sounds and words. We read these fully decodable books as a whole-class, in guided groups , one-to-one and in independent reading.
Guided reading
Guided reading is taught daily. During guided reading the teacher reads with a group of children who all read at the same ability level. Children read a short passage and explore comprehension questions as a group.
We use a reading scheme called Rising Stars: they offer a huge range of books written by experienced educational and children’s writers. All the books have been carefully levelled according to book banding criteria and Lexile measured to ensure steady progression throughout the programme. Children progress through the books until they become a ‘free reader’.
ERICA (Every Child Reading in Class Always)
Every day children read silently for 20 minutes. Children read leveled books from our reading scheme. This is an opportunity for children to progress through the reading scheme and work on their reading speed and fluency and, of course, their love of reading.
FRED (Families Reading Every Day)
We want to work together with our families to improve reading and we encourage children to read at home through our FRED home reading scheme. Every time a child reads for 20 minutes , she or he gets a ‘tick’ which we record in our FRED Reading Diaries.
When we receive 10,000 reads as a school, we celebrate with a whole school reward.
Comprehension lessons
We also have weekly comprehension lessons where children are taught the reading skills and abilities being measured or examined by a test (for example end of KS 1 and end of Key Stage 2 Standard Assessment Tests).
In these lessons children will learn to:
- Give and explain meaning of words in context
- Retrieve and record information
- Summarise main ideas from more than one paragraph
- Make inferences from the text/explain and justify inferences with evidence from the text.
- Predict what might happen from details stated and implied.
- Explain how meaning is enhanced through the choice of words or phrases.
- Make comparisons within the text.