Leaders: Mrs Kolseth, Mrs Hughes, Mrs Sheath and Miss Bassett

Our Curriculum

At St Mark's we believe that literacy and communication are key life skills and are crucial to a high quality education, equipping our children with the tools they need to participate fully as an articulate member of society. Through the literacy curriculum with its clear path of progression, we will enable children to communicate effectively, coherently and creatively through spoken and written language and provide them with the skills to become lifelong learners. The desire to inspire a love of reading drives our curriculum; we introduce children to a rich, wide and varied literary heritage.  We also explore texts from diverse cultures and use non-fiction texts to inspire writing across the curriculum.  We want our children to produce ‘beautiful’ work and therefore handwriting and presentation are also a key focus, along with equipping them with the editing skills to be self-regulators of their writing process.
 
Phonics and Reading Schemes used in KS1 include:

Phonics

• Phonics Shed
• Phonics Shed books

Reading and reading for pleasure 

• Oxford Reading Tree 
• Bug Club 
• Project X
• Big Cat Phonics

Phonics Shed

At St Mark’s we use a systematic, synthetic phonics programme called Phonics Shed.

Phonics Shed is a narrative driven multi-sensory phonics scheme that is divided into 4 different chapters, with each chapter building on the skills and learning of previous learning.

All children begin their phonic learning in Reception. They continue to develop their learning and apply their increasing phonic knowledge throughout Year 1.

At the end of Year 1 the children, pupils will take part in the Phonics Screening Check (PSC). Introduced by the Department of Education in 2011 to assess their phonic knowledge. 

In Year 2, phonics teaching continues for all children, to provide them with the best foundations for future spelling rules they will encounter is KS2 and beyond. Where there is a need, children in Key Stage Two may also take part in phonics teaching and learning.

Please see the resources below for more information on the scheme and resources you may find useful at home.