At South Benfleet Primary School, we teach a broad and balanced curriculum through carefully planned themes. Our curriculum incorporates the National Curriculum as well as the teaching of Religious Education.

As stated in our mission statement, our aim is always to make learning ‘fun, real, relevant and memorable’ so that:

• Children become motivated and enthusiastic self-learners who enjoy coming to school
• Children experience a wide but balanced range of activities
• Children are confident readers, writers and mathematicians
• Children make good progress and have high levels of achievement
• Children learn the key skills of communication, cooperation, teamwork, understanding, tolerance, perseverance and confidence
• Children understand British values
• Children are able to learn through creative first-hand experience and have high quality visits and visitors to enhance learning
• Children are ready for the next stage of their learning journey and life in ever-changing modern Britain

To help us plan clear progression from year to year we use the Chris Quigley ‘Essentials Curriculum’ to support our planning. Our planning is detailed, inclusive and differentiated to meet and challenge the needs of all pupils.

Please click on the link below for the National Curriculum for Key Stages 1 and 2

Phonics and Spelling

We believe that learning to read and write well are a vital foundation to any child’s education and that the development of good literacy skills is essential to academic success.

In the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) and Key Stage 1 (Infants) we make use of a daily structured phonics programme called ‘Letters and Sounds’. This is supplemented, particularly in EYFS, by the use of elements of ‘Jolly Phonics’: a fun and child centred approach for younger children which uses actions to represent sounds. We make use of a variety of other resources to support our teaching, such as ‘Bug Club Phonics’ and ‘Phonics Play’ which are online. Daily phonic activities help children to know letter sounds and build a bank of recognised common words for reading and writing. Children are taught phonics in phases and progress through six phases.

At the end of Year 1, children have to take a statutory phonics screening to assess their progress and understanding of phonics.

Reading

It is our aim to help children to find a love of reading. We want to develop reading skills with our pupils in order to improve life chances and provide them with life skills. We believe that reading improves language and vocabulary skills and stimulates imagination which all help to make good writers.

We use a variety of reading materials in school, including at least one reading scheme, ‘Oxford Reading Tree’, to help ensure progression. We also have a wide range of fiction and non-fiction books outside of published reading schemes in classrooms and in our school library which encourage children to enjoy ‘real books’.

It is our expectation that children should read a minimum of four times at home, with an adult every week and children are rewarded for achieving this expectation. To support reading at home, we have developed and provide our own detailed home school reading record book which has useful sections to explain different aspects of reading e.g. phonics and grammatical terms as well as ideas of questions to help gauge understanding of texts and develop comprehension skills. We ask parents to record in the reading record book each time they read with their child and this is monitored by the class teacher.

We teach reading through our literacy curriculum but also specifically through ‘Guided Reading’ sessions. Guided Reading is the method used to teach children to become fluent in decoding and confident with comprehension. Children are taught in small groups set according to ability. Guided Reading is principally the class teacher's responsibility and is planned and evaluated for all children by the class teacher. However, other trained adults can also teach guided reading sessions.