Curriculum
The school is highly ambitious for pupils to achieve their best. Across subjects, the curriculum is interesting and well crafted.
Ofsted 2024
At Shipley, we are proud of our broad and creative curriculum, which prioritises accurate and fluent word reading, spelling, handwriting and mathematics. It is designed to engage pupils at all levels with exciting topics and quality texts to inspire learning. High quality teaching and learning experiences underpin the curriculum planning. Topics reflect local, national and global issues and prepare pupils for life in a rapidly changing world.
Our school has a detailed curriculum plan, thematic and creative, adhering closely to national curriculum expectations. It encourages deep and immersive cross-curricular learning and is driven by quality texts. The focus is on knowledge and skills, ready for their next phase of education. The children learn from experienced and knowledgeable staff. French is taught across the school.
Rationale for our approach to the curriculum (including Learning Outside the Classroom)
- Enjoyment and engagement
- Rich and varied cross curricular opportunities - connected learning
- Wider, deeper knowledge and understanding
- High motivation and high engagement
- Personal development – confidence and resilience
- Development of emotional well-being and self-worth
- Development of social skills, team work and communication
- Experiences, challenges, memories and successes
- High aspirational beliefs – self and others
- High expectations of attainment and preparation for the next phase of education
Phonics and early reading at Shipley CE Primary School
We teach phonics and early reading skills using the Read, Write, Inc. approach. You may have heard this referred to as Synthetic Phonics.
Glossary of useful terms
Phonemes: the breaking down of words into their separate sound components
Phonemes can consist of more than one letter for example ch, oo, er, igh etc. In our teaching we discuss elements such as:
Digraphs: these are two letters that make a single sound eg: ar, ee, ou etc.
Trigraphs are three letters that make a single sound eg: igh.
Grapheme: is a phoneme written down.
Segmenting: where you break each word into its separate phoneme, for example ‘chop’ has 3 phonemes, ch/o/p.
Blending: simply putting those sounds back together to form a word.
Some words in the English language cannot be broken down into separate phonemes. These are known as tricky words and we teach the children to be able to read and know the whole word, for example, ‘said’ or ‘what’.
There are 3 sets of Speed Sounds which progress through the 44 phonic sounds. Once the children have Speed Sounds 1 they will start to use the Read, Write, Inc. reading and writing programme which incorporates: reading words, writing words and simple sentences. This goes from Red books to Grey books which the children should complete by Year 2. This is accompanied by Topic texts and story reading within the classroom.
These useful videos can help you to support your child as they learn with Read Write Inc. Phonics, with detailed ideas and advice on pronouncing pure sounds, blending, and digraphs.
