Dunholme St Chad's Church Of England Primary School

English at Dunholme St Chad's

What is the intent of our writing curriculum?

To enable everyone to flourish and achieve their ambition at our school, the English curriculum takes a multi-faceted approach and will:

Inspire and encourage all children to communicate freely and effectively in a variety of spoken and written forms, text types and genres, and for a range of audiences.
Inspire children to write with confidence, fluency and understanding as well as orchestrating a range of independent strategies to self-check and edit.
Inspire an interest in words and their meanings, developing a growing vocabulary in spoken and written forms to boost our pupils’ cultural capital and stimulate their motivation to pursue excellence in all that they do.
Inspire and develop our children’s powers of imagination, inventiveness and critical awareness to encourage them to become ambitious and aspirational individuals.
Take an inclusive approach to teaching and encouraging all children – regardless of background or ability - to write clearly, accurately and confidently for a variety of purposes and audiences.
Encourage children to develop a consistent, clear, fluent and joined cursive handwriting style and to inspire them to take pride in the presentation of their writing, in order to communicate meaning effectively.
Take an inclusive approach to teaching the conventions of writing, including grammar, punctuation and spelling.
Teach children how to plan, draft and edit their writing, in order to pursue excellence and achieve their best possible outcome.
Strive to ensure children feel valued as writers and to appreciate the writing of others through the exploration of a variety of rich and diverse literature and texts, to increase their cultural capital and inspire their ambitions and aspirations as writers.

	English Writing Policy 2026	[pdf 1MB]
	RWI Policy 2026	[pdf 893KB]
	Dunholme St Chad's - progression-in-non-fiction-text-types	[pdf 681KB]
	Dunholme St Chad's - progression-in-narrative-text-types	[pdf 614KB]
	Dunholme St Chad's Writing Spine 2024	[pdf 219KB]
	english-teaching-sequence	[pdf 246KB]
	Non-negotiables	[pdf 420KB]

What is the intent of our reading curriculum?

To enable everyone to flourish and achieve their ambition at our school, the English curriculum takes a multi-faceted approach and will:

Inspire children to read with confidence, fluency and understanding; orchestrating a range of independent strategies to self-check.
Inspire and develop our children’s powers of imagination, inventiveness and critical awareness to encourage them to become ambitious and aspirational individuals.
Inspire the children’s love and passion for reading and encourage them to see themselves as readers through bespoke reading practices for each individual child, based on promoting an emotional attachment to books, modelling the conventions of book handling and encouraging children to find pleasure in reading.
Ensure an inclusive and bespoke approach to teaching reading, so that every pupil in our school will form a love of reading and learn to read with fluency, confidence and a good understanding, irrespective of their background, needs or abilities.
Ensure every child leaves school with the ability to read widely and for pleasure.
Provide opportunities for our pupils to be exposed to a variety of genres and texts from an array of rich and diverse literature, to ensure they develop an everlasting enjoyment of reading, both within and beyond school, to contribute to their pursuit of excellence in their learning.
Ensure that there is a clear link between reading and writing and ensure that reading and the exploration of various text types are used to support and facilitate writing tasks.
Embed reading within the whole school curriculum to enable children to make connections and extend their understanding.
Select specific texts to develop pupils’ vocabulary and language comprehension, as well as expose them to high-level literature to enhance every child’s cultural capital and inspire them to become ambitious and aspirational individuals.

	Reading Policy 2026	[pdf 2MB]
	Dunholme St Chad's Reading Spine 2024	[pdf 1MB]
	ks1 reading vipers	[pdf 1MB]
	ks2 reading vipers	[pdf 1MB]

Why is reading important?

This year we will be working towards achieving the bronze award for the Lincolnshire Reading Pledge.

WHAT IS THE LINCOLNSHIRE READING PLEDGE?

Reading for pleasure

At Dunholme St Chad's, we follow these four core principles in our teaching practice to promote a love of reading in school:

High-quality reading aloud for pleasure. This is in addition to reading aloud as part of literacy teaching. Reading aloud for pleasure enables children to access rich, challenging texts, offers a model for silent reading, prompts affective engagement and creates a class repertoire of ‘texts’ in common’ to discuss.
Talking about texts reader to reader. Talk about texts is essential to all literacy teaching, but this reader to reader talk is more informal, often spontaneous, and includes reciprocal book recommendations between children and teachers.
Choice-led independent reading time. Children need time to read and support for making informed choices from a range of texts that tempt.
Social reading environments in and around school. These are key to creating a strong reading culture. Successful environments invite readers to engage and share the pleasures of reading.

A celebration of your child’s birthday in school!

St Chad’s is fortunate to be supported by wonderful parents, families, and wider community members who often ask if there is anything the school needs.

With this in mind, we are launching a new ‘Birthday Book’ initiative. On the occasion of a child’s birthday, parents can choose a special book from a class Recommended Reading List or a book of their choice, which will have their child’s name in the front bookplate, and will be shared with the class.

Books can be donated at the school office or given to the class teachers, where they will be labelled and added to their class library area for other children to enjoy.

Thank you for your generosity and support.

Amazon wish lists for all classes

Please find below Amazon wish lists for all classes that have books from their Recommended Reading Lists. However, please note that there is no obligation to purchase from this provider.

	New Link
	Reception Class
	New Link
	Year 1
	New Link
	Year 2
	New Link
	Year 3
	New Link
	Year 4
	New Link
	Year 5
	New Link
	Year 6

Additional Schemes to support English learning at Dunholme St Chad's

Collins Big Cat Book Bands supports children's development of fluency after phonics through a book band scheme. Children work their way through Purple to Pearl books, so that we have fluent and confident readers leaving Dunholme St Chad's at the end of Year 6.

More information can be found on their website: https://collins.co.uk/pages/collins-big-cat

Read Write Inc. Spelling supports the progressive teaching of spelling across year groups 2-6, building upon knowledge gained from the Read Write Inc. Phonics Programme.

Non-Negotiables each year group has a list of Non-Negotiable grammar and punctuation, which must be included in their writing by the end of the year.

	focused-reading-example-and-information	[pdf 688KB]
	ks1 reading vipers	[pdf 1MB]
	ks2 reading vipers	[pdf 1MB]
	Non-negotiables	[pdf 420KB]

Enrichment

English learning does not just take place within the classroom. It is enriched through its cross-curricular links, enabling experiences outside the classroom to inspire ideas within the classroom. This is done through:

Using Educational Visits and experiences to inspire writing. For instance, Year 3’s local visit to Snipe Dales and Year 6’s visit to the Holocaust Centre is used to inspire writing when they return to the classroom.
Reading is inspired through school events such as Book Week, in which children have the opportunity to partake in numerous activities across the school to immerse themselves in books and reading.
We have spoken to the children's author - Hannah Gold and gained insight about how to write an interesting novel.