St Paul's C.E Primary School

St. Paul's Primary Curriculum Plans

At St. Paul’s we have designed a rich and broad curriculum to inspire, motivate and enthuse a joy of learning. We provide opportunities for our pupils to increase their knowledge and understanding of the world through a skills-based curriculum, in which we deliver the National Curriculum by promoting children to be independent, active thinkers through questioning and enquiry. Subject leaders have explored the progression of their subject from EYFS through to Year 6 and have developed a sequential long term plan for their subject that encompasses the interests and needs of the children at St. Paul’s school. 

We are an inclusive school with a strong family ethos, which has been at the heart of every decision. Children of all abilities are given the opportunity to access the curriculum whilst developing and building upon their skills. We encourage children to think creatively in collaboration with others using a problem solving process called TASC (Thinking Actively in a Social Context). This teamwork approach supports the development of social skills, increases positive self-esteem, extends academic knowledge and provides opportunities for children to learn new and relevant experiences. The curriculum is adapted to meet the needs of individual children, who access the Additional Resource Provision alongside the mainstream school.

Below you will find the long term plans for each year group with the skills that are developed within each subject area throughout the year. The skills are taught through a range of contexts; where possible, interlinking other subjects with the geography, history or science based theme for that half term. These themes and subjects maybe be approached at different times throughout the year, please see the class pages for up to date information on what the children will be learning this half term. The children are expected to learn key facts related to each subject in order to build upon their knowledge and understanding of the world.

If parents need any more information about the school curriculum to contact Mrs Green who is our Curriculum Lead.

Phonics

At St Paul’s Church of England Primary School, we believe that the acquisition of language and communication skills should hold the utmost importance. We provide opportunities for the children to develop their spoken language, reading and writing skills in English lessons and across the curriculum. At St Paul’s, we have developed a bespoke curriculum to incorporate quality and engaging texts to interest and inspire our children as readers.

Reading is at the heart of our curriculum, as we firmly believe that it is the key to success in all subject areas, and leads us to opportunities in the wider world. The children are immersed in reading the moment they join us in our EYFS setting. Reading High Quality texts through a carefully planned English curriculum helps to develop language prgressively across school. 

We believe that in order for children to engage with ‘reading for pleasure’, they need to become confident readers in the first instance, gaining satisfaction for decoding words. We enable our children to do this through a systematic synthetic phonics programme. Our phonics lesson planning and delivery follows the ‘little Wandle' programme which introduces phonemes and graphemes systematically, thus enabling pupils to practise and build upon the phonics taught in class. Our phonics reading books are carefully saelected to support this scheme whilst also having a range of other reading books to stimulate and challenge the children further.

The Little Wandle phonics scheme meets the most recent core criteria (April 2021), provided by the DFE, which states that the scheme should be centred around, ‘a complete SSP programme providing fidelity to its teaching framework’, and ‘present systematic, synthetic phonics work as the prime approach to decoding print’.

Alongside the teaching of word reading, we deliver guided reading sessions from EYFS-Year 6 to teach skills needed for fluency and the comprehension of texts. 

Additionally, we deliver whole class comprehension lessons weekly, and reading for pleasure opportunities daily, and throughout the school year. We view home reading as an approach to consolidating reading skills/strategies and involving parents with their child’s reading progress and enjoyment. 

We have reading buddies set up across school pairing up older children with younger children to rolemodel and provide stimulatingmotivation to read from our older children.

At St Paul's Church of England Primary School, we share the belief that we are all 'readers' and support every child in reaching their full potential.

There is some continuation of phonics teaching into KS2 where individual pupils require support in this area.