English
A Love of Reading
At Hotham we teach children to become fluent, articulate readers, with a love of reading in all its forms.
Children are surrounded by books throughout their time at school. Our curriculum is built around a diverse selection of high-quality books, all of which have been carefully chosen to build children’s knowledge of language and the world around them.
Our reading curriculum is underpinned by a systematic phonics programme, which starts from nursery. In KS1 and KS2 we teach reading in whole class guided reading lessons. We focus on pupils developing their understanding of vocabulary, inference, retrieval, prediction and structure. We also actively teach fluency to enable pupils to become independent and proficient readers.
Hotham is lucky to have a library which is well-stocked with a large range of books. All children are provided with at least one reading book to take home which is very closely matched to their reading level.
Systematic Phonics
Children in EYFS and KS1 have a daily phonics lesson, in which they are systematically taught how to read. Pupils learn how to identify the different sounds in the words they hear, and they are then taught how these link to the letters we read. Pupils access books based on the sounds they have learnt. They are assessed regularly, and we use these assessments to identify pupils who may require additional support. At the end of Year 1, all pupils take part in a national Phonics Screening Check.
Our philosophy is that we support our children to ‘keep up’ rather than wait until they need to ‘catch up’. All children access phonics together, with sessions taught as a whole class. Any children - including those in KS2 - requiring additional support receive phonics interventions, taught by highly-trained staff.
Our phonics curriculum is based on Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised, which is a programme accredited by the DfE.
For more information on our phonics scheme, please see additional resources below:
Writing for Purpose
At Hotham we teach children to write for a purpose, whether it be stories shared with other classes, letters written to locals or writing from a character’s point of view.
Our approach to writing is built around a range of exciting and diverse core texts, linked to our termly Hotham projects. We use planning from ‘The Literacy Tree’ as well as teachers’ own resources, which are best suited to the needs of their class, and follow the philosophy of ‘teach through a text’. We engage pupils with a ‘hook’ into the text and then teach grammar, sentence structure, vocabulary and text construction, though the text. Pupils are taught to identify the key features of successful works, before planning, structuring and writing their own. We always use models, working through these so children understand what good writing looks and sounds like. After generating appropriate vocabulary, phrases, and sentence structures, we then guide pupils through the craft of creating successful writing. Children are encouraged to edit and redraft their pieces to produce beautiful work.
Rather than over-testing spellings, we carefully teach spelling which is closely linked to the children’s growing knowledge of phonics. Children in Year 2 upwards are taught the wonder of words, by looking for patterns, investigating rules and applying and re-applying their knowledge in different ways.
We teach cursive ‘Hotham handwriting’ from nursery upwards, meaning pupils leave our school with neat, joined handwriting.
Articulate Pupils
We value the art of articulacy, and aim to give our pupils the opportunity to become confident and eloquent public speakers.
We do this in a number of ways, including:
Project outcomes which often include opportunities for public speaking - past examples have included poetry recitals, museum audio guides, tour guides of the local area and exhibition explainers.
An integrated French curriculum which values speaking from nursery upwards.
Public speaking opportunities in assemblies.
School council elections, campaigns, and debates.
Model United Nations competitions and Debate Club.
Productions in EYFS, Y2, Y3 and a full musical at the end of Year 6.
English Curriculum Overview
Please see an overview of our English curriculum across the school by clicking the button below: