English

Curriculum Aims

Wisdom – Our children will acquire a wide vocabulary, read easily with fluency and good understanding and write accurately and coherently to communicate ideas. We will endeavour to ensure that phonics and early reading provide excellent foundations for building these skills.

Independence – Our children will learn to read widely for both pleasure and information. Through the use of exciting rich texts, we want children to produce unique and inspiring outcomes selecting their own ideas for presentation and genre.

Creativity – Our children will learn to be able to seek opportunities to create, refine and share outcomes with a real audience.

Kindness – Through reading, our children will learn to develop culturally, emotionally, intellectually, socially and spiritually.

Progression and Curriculum Documents

Reading and Phonics Meeting for Parents and Carers

Video for Reading Volunteers

VIPERS

At Newick, we regularly assess the children’s reading comprehension using VIPERS questions.

VIPERS is an acronym to aid the recall of the 6 reading domains as part of the UK’s reading curriculum. They are the key areas which we feel children need to know and understand in order to improve their comprehension of texts.

VIPERS stands for:

Vocabulary

Inference

Prediction

Explanation

Retrieval

Sequence or Summarise

The 6 domains focus on the comprehension aspect of reading and not the mechanics: decoding, fluency, prosody etc. This is covered in our early reading scheme, Rocket Phonics.

If you would like more information on the type of VIPERS questions you can ask your child when listening to them read, please click on the links below.

Useful Documents

Recommended Reading Books

Books Recommendations for Home

Vocabulary Grids

Writing Champions

To celebrate the amazing writing that children at Newick do, and to encourage more of it, we would like to announce our new Writing Champions initiative.

3 times a year, each class teacher will choose a member of their class to be a Writing Champion.

Those children chosen will receive a badge that they can wear on their uniform, which is theirs to keep. We hope there will be extra benefits and opportunities too!

To inspire and stimulate children to write, every term we will hold a writing collective worship. We will share ideas and prompts that children might like to write about. Any writing done at home can be placed in the box on our Writing Champions display by the library. At these collective worships we will also share and celebrate lots of the writing completed at home and in class.

Please encourage your children to write at home as often as possible. They can write about anything they like! If they are sports fans, they could write match reports about a game they’ve seen; if they have a particular interest or talent, they could write about that. If they have been inspired by a film, or a book they’ve read that could be their stimulus.

Every child who completes a piece of home writing will receive a certificate.

World Book Day 2023