At COLPAI, we firmly believe that every child deserves success right from the start. We know that the sooner children learn to read, the greater their success at school will be. This is why we put reading at the very heart of what we do. In EYFS and Key Stage One, we focus on learning to read; in Key Stage Two, the emphasis shifts to reading to learn. We use Read Write Inc. to ensure our pupils have secure phonic knowledge. Accurate, fluent decoders transition onto the scheme’s comprehension programme. Pupils ultimately ‘graduate’ onto a home-grown Reading curriculum that explicitly teaches new vocabulary and how to infer, predict, explain, retrieve information, sequence and summarise. Teachers plan units of work based on high-quality texts pitched in pupils’ zones of proximal development, tailoring text choices to make cross-curricular links, engage children and reflect COLPAI’s inclusive philosophy. Further to their Reading lessons, all children in Key Stage One and Two enjoy dedicated time in our beautiful school library, reading for pleasure.
Our Writing curriculum is completely bespoke, comprised of units of work inspired by a wealth of children’s literature. Cross-curricular links are made wherever meaningful and special events, such as Pride and Black History Month, are reflected in core text choices. Pupils across the school benefit from sequences of ‘small step’ lessons building to extended writing outcomes in various genres: diverse fiction and non-fiction writing outcomes have been mapped across year groups, key stages and pupils’ ‘COLPAI careers’. Children’s transcriptional skills are cultivated in discrete Spelling and Handwriting lessons, and targetted group and 1:1 interventions work to deepen, strengthen and extend learning.