Curriculum

At Waterwells, we follow a curriculum that develops our children in an engaging way encouraging high expectation. Within our curriculum are all the core and foundation subject areas in addition to visits, visitors to school and special projects. Each year group publishes a termly breakdown setting out curriculum coverage for that term.

These overviews can be found be clicking on the buttons below.

Reception  Year 1  Year 2 Year 3  Year 4 Year 5 Year 6

Reading at Waterwells – APPROACHES TO READING AND PHONICS

Reading

Children should be encouraged to want to learn to read and, having learned, want to continue to read to learn.
Pupils should know the value of books for retrieval of information and develop the appropriate skills to enable them to extract the information that they need from the relevant source.

A balanced approach to reading is established by using various approaches:

• Shared Reading (Use of Electronic material on the Interactive Whiteboards, Big Books)
• Guided Reading (at instructional level)
• Independent Reading (at fluency level)

It is necessary to provide a wide and interesting selection of material at appropriate levels for the child to both read and listen to, to this end the school Library has been developed and now provides an excellent range of material.

The child’s own reading needs to be a continuous balance between structured material from the school’s reading resource and a range of quality readers in the book corner/ library. To encourage a love for books children should be read to everyday if possible, once again from a range of genre. In line with the Simple view of Reading, the word recognition skills are taught which are needed to decode text and the language comprehension skills are taught which are needed to understand.

Resources:

• Key Stage 1: Oxford Reading Tree, Floppy Phonics, Ginn All Aboard Pattern and Rhyme & Non-Fiction, Heinemann Discovery World and Oxford Reading Tree Factfinders.
• Key Stage 2: Badger books / ‘Real’ Books

Parental Support:

The pupils take home a variety of books and parents are encouraged to read to, with and hear their child read on a regular basis and communicate with the teacher regarding progress. Reading Record books are provided for parents to record comments, questions or concerns.

Phonics & Spelling

Word recognition skills are developed systematically in the early years through the teaching of synthetic phonics. The National Strategy Letters and Sounds materials and the Jolly Phonics Programme are used. Phonics is taught daily.

Key Stage 2: Word Level work, as outlined in The New Primary Curriculum, is taught predominantly through:

• Support for Spelling
  For each group the work is regularly monitored and if necessary subsequently adapted to ensure it meets the children’s needs and that it extends their phonological awareness.

Appropriate dictionaries/word banks/word walls are available and children are encouraged to check their own work moving towards independence.

Letters and Sounds Resources

Letters & Sounds Information Letters & Sounds Games

Outdoor Learning

All of our classes take part in Outdoor Learning (Forest School) activities. At Waterwells, we are currently developing an area around the back of the school in the copse of trees to allow Outdoor Learning to take place onsite.We do a range of things such as pond work, building willow sculptures and learning about plant and animal life.