Literacy
Our Literacy curriculum encompasses both reading and writing. We are a reading school and recently won the Farshore Reading for Pleasure Whole School Award. We are proud to love reading and are passionate that we share this love with all of the children that attend Starcross Primary School. We focus on both the 'will' and the 'skill' in both our reading and writing curriculum goals.
You can read more about our Reading for Pleasure Award here:
Reading for Pleasure Project
Writing
At Starcross Primary School, we endeavour to create a love for literacy. We want every child to leave Starcross with the skills of an excellent writer.
We are determined that:
- Children develop enjoyment in writing – the ‘will’ to write.
- Children have the ability to write with fluency and each has an author’s voice.
- Children are writing for a purpose and their writing is engaging; they think about the impact they want their writing to have on the reader and know how they will achieve this.
- Children develop writing from high quality text models (often linked to the Babcock or CLPE Teaching Sequences).
- Children develop proficiency in writing in a range of genres. They have a sophisticated bank of vocabulary and an excellent knowledge of writing techniques to extend details or description; opportunities for writing purposefully are developed through other areas of the curriculum.
- Children develop writing stamina.
- Children are provided with the skills to embark on independent final writing outcomes in school.
- Children are motivated and have been explicitly taught the skills needed to re-read, edit and improve their writing so every piece of writing they produce is to the best of their ability and better than the last.
- Children display excellent transcription skills that ensure their writing is well presented, punctuated and spelt correctly.
Throughout their time at Starcross, children develop their skills by exploring a wide-range of genres, with a focus on exploring a range of models of excellence and using these to guide the drafting and editing process.
Writing Curriculum Plan
Reading
At Starcross Primary School, we are enormously proud of our teaching of Phonics.
Working with the Ilsham English Hub in 2019, we adopted a new Systematic Synthetic Phonics programme. This is delivered throughout our school – from Preschool up to KS2, where necessary, by highly skilled teaching staff, who have all undertaken full rigorous and effective training designed specifically for the Floppy’s Phonics Sounds and Letters programme.
Read more about our approach to reading in our reading curriculum policy below:
Reading Curriculum Policy
Floppy's Phonics
Reading for Pleasure
Every child has the right to read, and we do all we can within school to ensure this is a reality for every pupil.
Teachers are passionate about sharing a range of texts, both 'new and bold,' as well as 'old and gold,' recognising and valuing learner preferences, and being innovative and proactive when supporting pupils.
As well as receiving knowledge-matched reading books, all pupils take home Reading for Pleasure books, provided by the School Library Service. We encourage these books to be shared together at home, child and adult, no matter what age the child is.
In addition to supporting the skill to read, we are also passionate about facilitating children's will to read.
"Reading for pleasure is the single most important indicator of a child’s future success" OECD 2002
Reading for Pleasure enhances children's empathy, wellbeing, mental health and confidence, as well as their attainment. The benefits are numerous, and we are proud to be recognised as a school that promotes the identified areas of research-based pedagogy to support all children in our school.
Below are some links to external websites which explain more about reading for pleasure and give some great book recommendations if you are looking for ideas at home.
The above video explains how anyone interested in supporting young readers can complete this FREE badged course with the OU:
Free Badged Online Reading for Pleasure Course
Recommended RfP Websites, to support finding the 'perfect' book, or to enhance empathy or wellbeing, or just to find a book where your loved ones feel represented in the books they read, or to simply escape in humour!
Read for Empathy Collection 2022
Sign up for the Library Lady and/or Open University online newsletters for regular updates:
Open University resources for parents
Recommended Reading - Authors in the Spotlight and Top Texts:
Book Chat resources:
SPARK! Book Awards
Miss Lax and Miss Mann are promoting a really exciting (relatively) new children's book awards, which is wonderful and unique, in that it is the children within schools themselves who ultimately select the winner of these books! Miss Lax is on the guest panel looking at Poetry and Miss Mann is in the Fiction Aged 7+ category. The other exciting categories are: Picture Fiction and Fiction Aged 9+.
At present Miss Lax and Miss Mann are busy reading so many fantastic books donated to them from many publishers with the intention of supporting their category reach the final Twelve Books of Christmas! Early next year these twelve books will be shortlisted to four per category. These books will then be sent to all participating schools (including Starcross!) and then it will be left to the children to vote for their favourite!
We will receive our 16 shortlisted books (over the four categories) early next year and we will keep you posted!
Keep up to date by following our Twitter and Facebook @starcrossschool.
Join SPARK! Book Awards