English
Our School Vision:
To create a school that enables all pupils (no matter what background or starting point) to achieve their full potential and promotes the school as a beacon within the community, where aspirations are achieved and dreams are a reality for all pupils, staff and families.
Our English Vision:
At St Helen's, we believe that a thorough grasp of literacy skills is crucial to a high-quality education and will give our children the tools they need to participate fully as a member of society. We know that the sooner children learn to read, the greater their success at school, therefore we put reading at the heart of everything we do. We endeavour to engender a life-long love of reading. We recognise that mastery in phonics is fundamental to children being able to access a broad range of genres, across the curriculum. We aim to achieve this by teaching phonics using a highly structured and systematic approach with a relentless drive to address the needs of all learners.
We strive to ensure children become inquisitive about language and its structure, developing creative and enquiring minds which make connections, problem-solve and learn collaboratively. We want children not only to learn to read but to read in order to learn; reading exposes them to more than just words on a page, it opens their minds to different worlds, characters and experiences and is inseparable from the writing process. Here at St Helen's, our aim is to ensure children are motivated to write, take pride in their writing, can write clearly and accurately and adapt their language and style for a range of contexts. We use Power of Reading as a foundation for our writing curriculum to engage pupils through a book 'hook', which ensures quality children's literature is studied and used to inspire writing. Learning outcomes are progressive using the National Curriculum to ensure pupils consolidate each objective and can apply this within a range of text types throughout the year.
We also want to inspire children to be confident in the art of speaking and listening, creating classrooms where discussion is rich and varied, developing learning at all times. At St Helen's, we want our pupils to understand that they can achieve anything they set their minds to.
Click the link below to view our phonics and reading overview:
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