English

At Wavendon Gate School, we see reading as an integral part of our school curriculum that impacts all learning. Reading is at the heart of our curriculum and central to every pupil’s life at our school. We value the importance of being a confident reader and work hard to develop children’s reading skills. We want pupils to enjoy reading a diverse range of books and be able to talk about books and authors with confidence.

In our school, children participate in reading activities every day. These vary from taught sessions to opportunities for reading for pleasure and information. During guided reading lessons, children are taught and given opportunities to apply reading skills, including phonics, sight vocabulary, contextual cues, comprehension, inference and deduction. Teachers use a range of carefully selected resources when teaching children to read. Every opportunity is seized throughout the day to enable pupils to use their reading skills when accessing other areas of the curriculum. Teachers read aloud to the children on a daily basis and engage them in active discussions to promote an enjoyment of reading and to expose them to a range of vocabulary that may be beyond their current reading ability. 

For our pupils, learning to read and becoming a reader is a priority for us. We have developed our reading curriculum to ensure all children have opportunities to develop understanding in:

• Using their phonics to lift the words off the page  
• Developing communication and language skills, particularly by learning new vocabulary and key/familiar phrases  
• Applying their phonics to read words, captions, phrases, sentences and longer texts 
• Daily phonics, reading and English lessons in EYFS and KS1 
• Daily reading and English lessons in KS2 
• Reading as part of the wider curriculum  
• Sharing books, authors and illustrators during daily read-aloud sessions 
• Opportunities to independently read and be immersed in a book 
• Engaging in book talk: likes, dislikes, puzzles and connections

At Wavendon Gate School, we teach early reading using a program called Read Write Inc. Children at our school learn to read using a systematic approach to recognise the sounds that letters make; we call this phonics. Children in Foundation and Year 1 have daily phonics lessons to develop their independence in reading.

Read Write Inc. is supported by a wide range of completely decodable texts. These cover both fiction and non-fiction and are exciting and engaging for all our pupils. We match the home reading texts to each child’s current phonic knowledge to ensure that they consolidate their most recent teaching and learning at home.

Further information about phonics and how you can help your child at home

At Wavendon Gate School, we use Read Write Inc Phonics (RWI) to give your child the best possible start with their reading journey. We have put together a guide explaining how the RWI programme works, together with some useful links. Miss Sheridan is our phonics lead teacher, so if you have questions about RWI, contact the school, which can refer you to her. Please take the time to read the information below, as it will provide invaluable information as to how you can help and support your child in reading.

What is Read Write Inc.?

Read Write Inc (RWI) is a complete phonics programme that helps all children learn to read fluently and at speed so they can focus on developing their skills in comprehension, vocabulary and spelling as early as possible. The programme is designed for children aged 4–7 years.

Click here to see how you can support your child at home with phonics

Read Write Inc. teaching sequence

Foundation

Reading

The children:

• learn 44 sounds and the corresponding letters/letter groups using simple picture prompts – see below
• learn to read words using Fred talk and sound blending
• read from a range of storybooks and non-fiction books matched to their phonic knowledge
• work well with partners
• develop comprehension skills in stories by answering ‘Find It’ and ‘Prove It’ discussion questions

Writing

The children:

• learn to form and write the letters/letter groups which represent the 44 sounds with the help of fun phrases
• learn to write words by using Fred talk
• learn to build sentences by practising sentences out loud before they write

Talking

The children work in pairs so that they:

• answer every question
• practise every activity with their partner
• take turns in talking and reading to each other
• develop ambitious vocabulary

Year 1 & Year 2

Children follow the same format as Foundation but will work on complex sounds and read books appropriate to their reading level. Daily sessions of RWI phonics last for 30 minutes. Once children become fluent, speedy readers, they will move on to guided reading sessions in Year 2.

To support children in upper Key Stage 2 who are working below national expectations in reading, we deliver the Fresh Start intervention program. Fresh Start uses the same teaching and learning principles as Read Write Inc. phonics and includes many of the same activities. The modules contain fully decodable texts and are age-appropriate to capture the interest of our older students. These sessions are delivered daily in small groups or individually. We aim to get students reading accurately and fluently as quickly as possible so they can catch up with their peers.

Once children have sufficient knowledge of phonics to read some short books independently, reading skills are developed through daily guided reading lessons. During these lessons, children are encouraged to discuss books with a growing understanding and enthusiasm. Exciting and challenging texts are chosen to broaden pupils’ understanding of language, develop fluency and further enjoyment. Please see our overview below, which outlines our class focus texts for guided reading sessions.

Whole-School Reading Spine

Whole-School Poetry Spine 

Whole-School Reading Overview

Whole-School Reading Progression

Every pupil at Wavendon Gate School is given a reading book that is appropriate for their age and stage of development, which they can take home and share with you. Developing readers are encouraged to read the same book a few times on different occasions during the week before swapping it for a new one. This is to allow them to develop their reading stamina and to practise new words. Children are regularly assessed using an online system to measure fluency, accuracy and comprehension.

The books span Foundation to Year 6 using a colour-coded band system. Pupils who take part in daily phonics lessons bring home books from our phonics scheme that contain the current focus sounds. In Key Stage 2, these colour codes ensure age-appropriate texts and guide pupils to experience a rich breadth of authors and genres (fiction, poetry and non-fiction). Click below to learn more about our book banding.

Book Band Reference Sheet

In all year groups, we teach writing through high-quality texts, ranging from picture books to Shakespeare, and seek to include theatre visits and visiting authors and artists to help us to bring stories to life.

During their time at Wavendon Gate School, pupils will write a variety of fiction and non-fiction texts, including recounts, news reports, explanation texts, poems, plays and stories of all kinds. We use drama, role-play, storytelling and discussion to engage the imagination, before moving on to vocabulary exploration, sentence craft and creative writing.

Throughout the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) and Key Stage 1, children are taught the key principles of writing in order to lay a solid foundation for developing their skills later on. To ensure our pupils have the best possible foundations for writing, we deliver daily, discrete handwriting lessons in EYFS and Key Stage 1. These dedicated sessions place a heavy emphasis on developing an accurate pencil grip and clear handwriting with ‘finger spaces’ between each word. Children are taught to apply their knowledge of phonics to help them spell accurately, and to structure their work, whether it be fiction writing or a set of instructions. Our curriculum teaches the children to add variation and description to their work by developing their vocabulary, including the use of interesting adjectives and adverbs and developing sentence structure using conjunctions and sentence openers. By the end of Key Stage 1, children have been taught the fundamentals of punctuation and grammar. This structural and technical knowledge is fostered alongside developing a love for writing as a lifelong means for communication and expressing oneself.

Throughout Key Stage 2, these solid foundations are built upon as children develop their unique writing style. Children are taught to write for a range of purposes – to entertain, inform, persuade and discuss – using explicit sentence models and ambitious vocabulary. They then learn to shape these sentences into coherent paragraphs before planning and creating their own original works of fiction and non-fiction. 

Children are also given frequent opportunities to apply their writing skills across the curriculum, whether that is writing up experiments in science, recounting events in history or describing processes in geography, to name a few.

Whole-School Writing Overview

Whole-School Writing Progression

At Wavendon Gate School, we believe that fluent handwriting is a vital tool for a child’s learning. Following the Ruth Miskin Read Write Inc. framework, our handwriting lessons make the physical act of writing automatic.

When children can form letters without stopping to think about how to draw them, their minds are freed up to focus on creative writing, spelling and vocabulary. We teach handwriting through four structured stages, ensuring your child builds a fast, legible and comfortable writing style.

The Foundations: Grip & Posture
Before children practise writing, we teach them the physical setup needed for success.

Perfect Posture: We encourage children to sit with their feet flat on the floor, their backs straight and their chairs tucked in.
The Tripod Grip: We teach children to hold their pencil securely between the thumb and forefinger, resting it on the middle finger.
The Non-Writing Hand: The hand not holding the pencil should always act as a "paper anchor" to keep the page steady.

The Four Stages of Learning

Stage 1: Letter Formation & Sizing
This stage is taught alongside initial phonics sounds. Children learn to form lowercase letters on unlined paper using engaging picture mnemonics and phrases. These phrases give children a visual anchor so they can track the pencil movements in their minds.
Example: For the letter d, we say: "Around the dinosaur's bottom, up its tall neck and down to its feet."

Once the shapes are accurate, children learn about relative letter sizes using a "sun, boat and water" orientation guide:
Sun letters are tall and reach up high (like b, d, h, k, l, t).
Boat letters sit neatly on the line (like a, c, e, i, m, n, o, r, s, u, v, w, x, z).
Water letters have descenders that sink below the line (like g, j, p, q, y).

Stage 2: Capital Letters & Sizing Flow
Children learn how to form capital letters and understand their scaling relative to lowercase letters. They practise writing words with a clear, steady flow, ensuring that letters do not crowd or bump into each other.

Stage 3: Learning to Join
Once children can form letters of the correct size and scale them with confidence, they learn how to connect them. We teach the two main connection styles:
The Hill Join: Connecting from the bottom of one letter to the top of the next (e.g., joining a to t).
The Bridge Join: Connecting from the top of one letter straight across to the next (e.g., joining o to n).

Stage 4: Developing a Mature Style
In the final stage, pupils build up their writing stamina and speed. They adapt their joined handwriting into a highly legible, beautifully styled and effortless personal hand that serves them across the entire school curriculum.

Whole-School Handwriting Overview

Pupils in Foundation and Year 1 are taught spelling through the Read Write Inc. resources during daily phonics lessons. They learn to decode (read) the words and encode (spell) the words simultaneously during lessons.

Pupils in Years 2–6 follow the Spelling Shed curriculum, which has been developed through the latest science of reading research. Rather than asking children to memorise a list of words for a short-term test, our lessons focus on teaching the overarching patterns and structural rules of the English language. Through a blend of direct phonics instruction, word study and spiral reviews, pupils explore orthography (how letters represent sounds), morphology (how root words, prefixes and suffixes change meanings) and etymology (the historical origins of words). This deep linguistic knowledge allows children to build automatic word recognition and apply their skills confidently to unfamiliar words in their everyday writing. To reinforce this learning, children are given access to the digital Spelling Shed platform, where game-based practice and short-term retrieval challenges turn essential spelling drills into an engaging, high-enthusiasm independent learning experience both at school and at home.

Whole-School Spelling Overview