Our Mission
Reading
Here at St Joseph’s, we are dedicated to promoting a positive attitude towards reading along with the development of lifelong, essential reading skills. We hold the attitude that reading is the key that opens up opportunities for children to academically succeed.
By the time our children leave in Year 6, our aim is for them to be competent and enthusiastic readers that can decode unfamiliar words, have good comprehension skills and can read aloud with confidence and ease.
With our new library in the centre of school being enjoyed by our pupils, we hope to recognise the use of books for pleasure as well as learning. We truly believe it is the heart of our school. The children need directing to authors and books based on their interests and tempted with recommended books. All children have access to our school library that is promoted through a break-time rota system along with allocated slots in the timetable to change and monitor reading books regularly.
Across the school, all teachers follow the ‘whole class reading’ approach that demonstrates the importance of adults reading to children – this modelling of fluent, intonate reading is how we teach our children to read to enhance meaning and purpose of the text. We focus on providing our children with challenging texts, exposing them to new vocabulary and engaging the children in the text each lesson.
Writing
It is our intent that our pupils become confident communicators and writers. Pupils write with purpose every day and there are opportunities for planning, drafting, sharing, evaluating and editing. Through the process of peer and self-editing, children are equipped with the skills to understand how to improve their own learning.
Our learning journeys in English begin with a stimulus to inspire our children to write. From using high-quality texts to videos or images, all are aimed to spark a purpose for writing and engage their imaginations.
Each expected outcome is carefully planned and sequenced to allow the children to apply the necessary skills more independently in their final outcome. We aim to embed a variety of text types across the children's time here so that they can eventually compose their own success criteria for a written piece.
Grammar and vocabulary work is taught purposefully and in context. Our teachers also use flashback activities throughout the year to revisit and consolidate learning as necessary. We believe that these reminders and revisits are essential to transporting knowledge into our long term memory and allowing it to remain there to be used at any given time.