At St Gregory’s RC Primary School, communication skills are a high priority and are taught through every part of the curriculum, especially English. Children are exposed to a vocabulary rich curriculum and cultural capital experiences are carefully planned to enhance speaking and listening skills and give children new experiences.

Every child will be a fluent, confident and competent reader and enjoy reading for pleasure. Reading is the key to accessing all other learning and is a necessary life skill to allow children to go on and be successful in their chosen field and make a difference in the wider world. Reading gives children the skills needed to be able to read the Word of God for themselves and to live out the Gospel values.

We prepare children with the essential writing skills they will need for later life by providing an enriched and engaging English curriculum, where they write with a clear purpose across all subjects. Our writing curriculum stems from high quality texts written by established authors covering a wide range of genres. Each text has been purposely placed in accordance with the wider curriculum, wellbeing of the children and/or the diverse community in which we live.

Reading

At St Gregory’s we are passionate about reading because we believe that it is the foundation of success. We aim for all of our children to develop a life- long love of reading. Reading is taught via Read Write Inc (RWI), Reading and Modelled Practice (RAMP), and by hearing children read on a weekly basis. From Year 2 upwards, we use Accelerate Reader to check children’s understanding of the books they have read and to ensure they are pitched at the correct level for each child.