Curriculum Intent

For every child to enjoy an innovative, creative and inclusive curriculum that provides them with the skills and experiences to flourish. To provide the foundations for lifelong learning, aspirational futures and commitment to make a positive impact on the world. 

Values

Respect, Trust, Courage, Kindness, Thankfulness, Humility

Our curriculum is underpinned by 6 values which are woven into our whole school vision.

Phonics and Reading

At Torrisholme, we believe that reading is probably the most important skill for life that we teach our children. Success in learning to read is crucial to success in other areas of the school curriculum.

In Reception, Year 1 and Year 2, all the children have daily phonics sessions which help them with their reading, writing and spelling. Teachers plan these sessions following the 'Essential Letters and Sounds' framework. In addition to these sessions, targeted intervention sessions are run in phonics, to help some children develop these skills.

All children will have a reading book, which is chosen for them from a large bank of reading books, which is matched to the stage of their reading and phonic development. These books are all published by Oxford University Press. These books are fully decodable and can be read independently by your child and with letter sounds they have been taught in school.  Later on in school, children move on to reading books from a selection of ‘Colour Book Bands’ that are designed to progress and challenge their reading and comprehension ability. When children are considered a 'Free Reader', their reading fluency and understanding is such that they are able to select and tackle age-appropriate and suitable books for themselves. At each stage of children's reading development, their book level is carefully matched to support and develop both their reading fluency alongside their comprehension.

Throughout school, we encourage children to read regularly at home, to practise their reading skills. We also run workshops for parents, to help them to support their children as they learn to read.  Please encourage your child to read their books independently and then to re-read for fluency and understanding.

In class, children also take part in regular 'guided reading' sessions, where they work on developing reading and comprehension skills such as inference and deduction. In EYFS and Year 1, this happens in small phonic phase groups, using texts that closely match the children's phonic ability. From Year 2 onwards, we adopt a whole class guided reading approach where we use a range of texts across different genres to develop our comprehension skills.

All of us at Torrisholme have a desire to encourage a genuine love of reading. Therefore, all classes have regular story sessions where novels, poems and non-fiction texts are shared for pleasure and enjoyment.