St. Mary of the Angels Catholic Primary School

Literacy at St. Mary of the Angels

Intent
At St. Mary of the Angels, we work hard to cultivate and nourish a love and joy of Reading, Writing and Oracy which is evident in pupil's work, our learning environments and in the pupils themselves. By the time children leave our school as lifelong learners, we expect them to communicate confidently through speaking and listening, reading and writing, with fluency and understanding in a range of situations. Literacy is an essential and integrated component of Teaching and Learning across the whole Primary Curriculum. It enables pupils to access and succeed in all subject areas. We aim to help children to develop a love for the English language; through the spoken and written word. We recognise the significance of effective teaching and learning for literacy and know it is a prerequisite for all educational and social progress.

At St. Mary of the Angels, we recognise that pupils need effective communication skills to equip them for everyday life, to perform the most basic routines and survive and function in our society. Mastery over language empowers children to communicate, creatively and imaginatively, as well as allowing them engagement with the world at large and express themselves orally. Therefore, having a solid understanding of literacy is a fundamental right of every child.

The English curriculum at St. Mary of the Angels is supported by cross-curricular themes structured in half termly blocks. Our balanced creative curriculum promotes the spiritual, moral, cultural, mental and physical development of pupils and prepares them for the opportunities, responsibilities and experiences of later life.

Reading

Intent

At St. Mary of the Angels we celebrate reading. We believe that the ability to read is fundamental to our children succeeding; enabling them to access the next stage of their education and beyond. Reading is at the heart of everything we do and forms the core of our curriculum. We strongly believe that the teaching of Reading should be motivating and enjoyable. As well as teaching Word Reading and Comprehension we aim to foster a lifelong appreciation and love for reading in our pupils. All pupils have access to rich, high-quality texts and are encouraged to read widely in order to develop a broader understanding of world around them, and just as importantly, for pleasure.

Implementation

Guided Reading
After children have successfully mastered the skills to read fluently from ELS Phonics they will begin to further develop their reading skills through Guided Reading. Our daily guided reading sessions for Years 2-6, known as Book Talk, are an engaging, discussion-based, inquisitive experience during which a love of reading is nurtured. At St. Mary of the Angels, we currently use both the Whole Class Reading and Carousel approach, dependent on the needs of individual classes and children.

This approach uses high quality texts and the specific teaching of skills. Strong links are made between reading and writing. During these sessions children are taught the VIPERS reading strategies and skills. VIPERS is based upon the English Reading Test Framework (2016) and uses an acronym to aid the recall of the 6 reading domains. These domains 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

Our daily guided reading sessions intend to:

Develop pupil word reading skills and develop strategies if they get stuck on a word (decoding & blending)
Improve pupils comprehension skills including, inference and deduction and retrieval of key information
Provide high-quality teacher led or group discussion
Encourage discussion and ‘Book Talk’, enabling pupils to dissect, discuss thoughts and opinions and asks meaningful questions about what they have read
Encourage pupils to become active listeners when engaging with a text
Expose pupils to a wide range of rich texts in a variety of genres and styles (this includes fiction texts, non-fiction texts and poetry as well as visual texts)
Establish a genuine appreciation and love for reading
Cultivate a culture of reading for pleasure
Provide opportunities for pupils to respond to reading texts through a variety of focused, differentiated activities; including comprehension, vocabulary, spelling and grammar based tasks

Areas for Reading throughout our school
Our themed reading corners provide a focal point in each classroom; these are inviting spaces for pupils to relax and read for pleasure. Each reading corner is imaginatively decorated to celebrate a theme, chosen book or author. Reading corners are organised by genre complete with a wide variety of engaging texts to encourage reading for pleasure and establish an appreciation of literature.

Our whole school passion for reading is also evident in our school Library. Our library is well-resourced; with over 2000 high quality texts ranging from Pictures Books, KS1 fiction, KS2 fiction, Poetry and Plays and a broad selection of Non-Fiction genres.We wish to further improve and develop our reading spaces across the school, and have been provided a grant by the Libraries for Primaries campaign, lead by the National Literacy Trust. St. Mary of the Angels will work with them in 2026 to upgrade and improve our library space, to support a strong reading for pleasure culture within our school.

SMA READING PROGRESSION MAP 2025-2026

[pdf 251KB]

Writing

Intent

At St.Mary of the Angels we believe the exposure of children’s literature within the primary school setting is vital as a rich context for learning; not only within English as a subject but to support building a reading culture throughout the school.

In order to prepare our children for the future, our goal is for every child to develop a love for Literacy and to leave our school as confident writers who are able to:

enjoy the activity of writing across the curriculum.
develop the knowledge and skills need to become critical thinkers and informed writers.
use composition, grammar, spelling and handwriting skills to become effective communicators in writing.

We aim to:

teach a wide range of exciting and real writing opportunities, e.g. narratives, explanations, descriptions, comparisons, summaries and evaluations.
developing pupils’ vocabulary actively, building systematically on pupils’ current knowledge.

We believe that a child’s learning should be meaningful and contextualised. Our writing curriculum builds on pupils’ love of literature, using rich high quality texts as stimulus for the teaching of writing. We believe that high-quality texts are essential in raising children’s attainment in writing. We ensure that all children are exposed to celebrated children’s authors and develop a respect and appreciation for books. Key texts are chosen to accompany our creative curriculum theme for the term. We always aim for our writing opportunities to be meaningful and to feel authentic. Books offer this opportunity: our aim is that children have real reasons to write, whether to explain, persuade, inform or instruct and that where possible, this can be embedded within text or linked to a curriculum area. Writing in role using a range of genres is key to our approach. Grammar and spelling are always embedded into Writing lessons. Teachers carefully plan English units linked to the termly theme, considering the knowledge, skills, vocabulary and cultural experiences that the children will need. We are supported by Literacy Consultant Lillie McCotter, and also use elements of the Literacy Tree and CLPE to support our English planning and staff training.

Implementation

What does Writing look like at St Mary of the Angels?

A unit of study may last 1-4 weeks

Recommended writing process:

Week 1- Hook involving drama, film, speaking and listening, event etc, sequencing, story mapping, inferencing
Week 2- Vocabulary, text features, sentence structure, cohesion, grammatical features
Week 3 - Modelled writing, drafting, independent writing (an extended piece of work-writing a quality piece of narrative/poetry/non-fiction/diary entry based on the genre), editing

Through our writing curriculum we intend to:

Inspire and motivate pupils to engage with a range of writing genres.
Enable pupils to compose or articulate their ideas and structure them in spoken and written language.
Develop pupils’ competence in Transcription (spelling and handwriting – and composition).
Teach pupils to plan, draft, revise, evaluate and edit their writing.
Teach pupils to write and record their ideas fluently by spelling quickly and accurately.
Give pupils strategies for organising ideas coherently for a reader.
Enable pupils to demonstrate an awareness of audience, purpose and context in their writing.
Instil spelling, punctuation and grammar skills.
Integrate all areas of the curriculum through a rich use of composition and variety of writing genres.

	SMA WRITING CURRICULUM OVERVIEW 2025-2026	[pdf 726KB]
	SMA WRITING PROGRESSION MAP 2025-2026	[pdf 317KB]

Handwriting

In Key Stage 1 and 2, pupils are taught handwriting using the Nelson Handwriting Scheme through Oxford Owl. This starts in Year 1 and continues to Year 6. Teachers have high expectations of pupil’s handwriting and presentation across all subject areas. The handwriting journey continues across the key stages through the teaching of capital letters, positioning and forming letters correctly on the line, moving on to diagonal and horizontal strokes and finally reaching well-presented fluent joining of letters. It is crucial that all lower case and upper case letters are formed correctly before moving on to joins to ensure legible fluent handwriting. In Year 4 pupils will begin to transition from pencil to pen and gain their pen license when there is enough evidence to show handwriting is well-presented with fluent joining of letters. Children in EYFS are taught to write letters through the ELS phonics scheme.

Spelling

At St. Mary of the Angels, we use ELS Essential Spelling and Word Knowledge to teach structured spelling lessons for Years 2-6. ELS Essential Spelling and Word Knowledge aids the important transition from phonics to spelling. Our spelling lessons focus on teaching children to understand the patterns in the English language using a combination of morphology, etymology and application of phonological rules. There is a weekly focus, which will then be practised in spelling homework, given out weekly by class teachers.

Why we use Essential Spelling and Word Knowledge

In 2025, the Department for Education introduced The Writing Framework, which emphasises structured, knowledge-rich writing instruction. Essential Spelling and Word Knowledge aligns with this framework by offering a systematic, phonics-based approach to spelling in Year 2, and then teaching spelling and vocabulary in Years 3-6 through a systematic focus on morphology and etymology.