Our Kildwick Curriculum

At Kildwick CE VC Primary School we value the individuality of all our children, irrespective of ethnicity, attainment, age, disability, gender or background. We are committed to giving all our children every opportunity to achieve the highest of standards in all that they do, underpinned by our deeply Christian ethos. We do this by taking account of pupils’ varied life experiences and needs. We provide our children with an exciting and creative curriculum, in which many subjects are taught through themes.  This thematic approach to teaching and learning inspires our children and engages them in their learning. We encourage children to be inquisitive learners and ask questions, offering them the opportunity to consolidate and revisit previous learning in order to deepen understanding and create life -long learners. Their achievements, attitudes and well-being matter and we offer them the opportunity to discover their gifts and talents given to them by God and experience ‘life in all its fullness’ (John 10:10).

Phonics

At Kildwick CE Primary School, we strive to ensure that all children become successful, fluent readers by the end of Key Stage One. We believe this is achievable through a combination of high quality, discrete systematic phonics teaching combined with a language rich curriculum that promotes a reading for pleasure culture.

We teach reading through Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised, which is a systematic and synthetic phonics programme. We start teaching phonics in Reception and follow the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised progression, which ensures children build on their growing knowledge of the alphabetic code, mastering phonics to read and spell as they move through school. We also model the application of the alphabetic code through phonics in shared reading and writing, both inside and outside of the phonics lesson and across the curriculum.

Phonics Reading Scheme

Our reading sessions in EYFS and Key Stage One are closely linked to our phonics programme. We teach children to read through reading practice sessions three times a week. These sessions are:

  • taught by a fully trained adult to small groups.
  • using books matched to the children’s secure phonic knowledge from The Big Cat Collins series of books.
  • monitored by the class teacher to ensure close assessment and progression of each child.

Each reading practice session has a clear focus, so that the demands of the session do not overload the children’s working memory. The reading practice sessions have been designed to focus on three key reading skills:

  • decoding
  • prosody: teaching children to read with understanding and expression
  • comprehension: teaching children to understand the text. 

The decodable reading book that has been worked on that week is sent home for further practice.

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