Our Reading Curriculum
At St. Mary’s, we are committed to fostering confident communicators who excel as fluent readers and writers. Our English curriculum is enriched with oracy and language, providing children with the skills they need for their educational journey. We nurture a love for literature, encourage pleasure in reading, and use books as a gateway to explore knowledge across the broader curriculum.
Phonics and Early Reading
We follow the Department for Education (DfE) validated ‘Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised’ scheme, which offers a clear and structured pathway to reading. Phonics is taught discretely and daily, with all staff adhering to the programme’s principles.
Our approach ensures children read books carefully matched to their phonics knowledge and common exception words. This alignment enables early reading success, building confidence and fluency. Re-reading and discussing books with their teacher reinforces decoding skills, while high-quality shared texts promote reading for pleasure.
Reading in Key Stages 1 and 2
Once children complete the ‘Little Wandle’ phonics programme, they progress to daily Whole Class Reading lessons. These lessons, guided by the Pathways to Reading scheme, focus on building reading fluency, comprehension, and vocabulary.
The Pathways to Reading programme uses a mastery approach, with progressive skill development from Year 2 through Year 6. Each unit spans a half-term and includes six whole-class reading sessions, incorporating high-quality texts that engage and challenge learners.
In Key Stage 2, reading lessons focus on shared whole-class instruction, providing opportunities for mastering key skills. In Year 2, children benefit from a combination of whole-class lessons, small-group guided reading sessions, and individual reading. For children in Years 2–6 who require additional phonics support, we offer individualised reading programmes featuring decodable texts to ensure continued progress.
Vocabulary and Skills Development
Expanding vocabulary is integral to our approach. The Pathways to Read programme enhances this work by embedding vocabulary-building opportunities into each lesson. Reading skills are taught, practiced, and mastered through repetition, with follow-up tasks allowing pupils to independently demonstrate their learning.
We also use VIPERS (Vocabulary, Inference, Prediction, Explanation, Retrieval, and Sequence/Summarise) as a framework, ensuring children meet National Curriculum objectives while becoming confident, skilled readers.
Reading for Pleasure
Creating a love of reading is at the heart of our curriculum:
- Each class enjoys a dedicated read-aloud time, where teachers share challenging, high-quality texts with the class.
- Our book-rich reading environments offer children access to an array of inspiring books.
- Once children complete the phonics programme, they explore our 100 Recommended Reads—a curated list from Peter’s—to encourage reading for breadth and depth.
Our School Library, a welcoming and cosy space, is central to our school community. Families are invited to explore the library together, and children can borrow books to take home and enjoy.
Writing Links
For schools implementing both Pathways to Reading (P2R) and Pathways to Write (P2W):
We use Pathways to Write to align our writing curriculum with Pathways to Read. This creates meaningful connections between texts, topics, and subjects such as Literacy, Humanities, and Science.
If you have further questions about our reading curriculum or want details about termly skills, please contact your child’s class teacher. You can also find the end-of-year expectations for reading for each year group in the attached documents.
Our Writing Curriculum
We use the Pathways to Writing Scheme for our teaching and learning. The units, for use with pupils from EYFS to year 6, provide clear detailed lesson plans and resources, linked to high-quality texts to ensure engaging and purposeful English lessons. Each unit of work incorporates teaching strategies designed to engage and challenge writers
This dovetails and is underpinned by our Trust's ‘How we teach’ pedagogical approach based on Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction.
Key elements of Pathways to Spell
Pathways to Spell is designed for whole-class teaching of the primary national curriculum objectives for spelling from Year 2 to year 6. It is a comprehensive and progressive programme with a clear, research-based teaching sequence.