At Oakthorpe, Literacy is taught discretely in all classrooms but is linked wherever possible to the over-arching theme of the half term. The school uses the books listed in Pie Corbett's Reading Spines as a starting point to design a curriculum. These books are also used as class reads. The books for each year group are listed on the class pages for your information.

The documents below are the school's policy for reading and handwriting. These have been developed by staff to outline the school's approach to reading and writing across the curriculum to ensure a well-rounded approach to children experiencing a range of texts.

In EYFS and Key Stage 1, the staff use the Letters and Sounds phonics scheme. This is accompanied with a focus on Visual Phonics which includes actions and songs for each grapheme. These are also linked to the speech and language research around how the sounds are made by the mouth. Miss Cree is currently undertaking funded research around this approach to phonics. For more information about phonics and handwriting see the documents below used during parent workshops.

For more information about how we teach reading, please follow this link.

Writing

The documents below give an overview of writing at Oakthorpe in each year group. This includes an overview for spellings, handwriting, grammar and genres for writing.

At the end of each unit in the other subjects of the curriculum, the children write an essay to show their learning retention and to show how they are connecting their knowledge.