Gorse Covert Primary School

Reading

At Gorse Covert Primary, we believe that being able to read fluently is the route to achieving well in all areas of the curriculum. We aim to support our children on this important journey so that they also develop life-long readers who have a love of reading.

Learning to read begins with our daily phonics lessons where the children begin to blend and segment sounds to decode words. To complement phonics we also have weekly guided reading sessions and individual books that are taken home to read. These books follow our book bands and are from a range of reading schemes such as Bug Club, Big Cat Phonics, Oxford Reading Tree and Treetops.

Our phonics teaching follows the DfE Approved Phonics sheme Little Wandle. 

Writing

Learning letter shapes and names is done at the same time as learning to read and we aim to develop confident and creative writers. Writing is taught through learning grammatical features and studying a range of fiction non-fiction genres to inspire children’s own writing.

To develop children’s handwriting, we teach cursive handwriting which supports joined handwriting and spelling patterns.

Spelling

The National Curriculum specifies particular words that children should be able to spell in each year group. These words are incorporated into our teaching as well as common spelling patterns.