English

Grove Road’s Core Topic Texts: 2 year cycle

Year One

 

Year / Term	Nursery	Reception / KS1	LKS2	UKS2
Year one Autumn 1	Leaf Man Red Leaf, Yellow Leaf Goat Goes to Playgroup Our House My Friends and me	This is me Owl babies (T4W) I wish I’d been a Unicorn	Stone Age – Iron Age  How to wash a Woolly Mammoth (Robinson)  DK Findout Stone Age (DK)  Stuck in the Stone Age (Rodkey)	WWII Owen and the Soldier (Thompson) When the Sky Falls (Earle)
Year one Autumn 2	10,9,8 Owls up late! Kind	Our house in the middle of our street Mr Wiggle and Mr Waggle (T4W) Town Mouse Country Mouse	Stone Age – Iron Age   Stone Age Boy (Kitamura)  The Boy with the Bronze Axe (Fidler)	WWII Now or Never (Rai) After the War (Palmer)
Year one Spring 1	Bear Hunt Squash and a squeeze Journey Home from Grandpas The Suitcase Hairy Maclairy	I need a hero Supertato Eliot Midnight Superhero	Epic Earth  Journey to the Centre of the Earth: Usbourne Young Reading (Courtauld)  100 things you should know about extreme earth (Claybourne)	Journeys Journey to Jo’Burg (Naidoo) The Arrival (Tan) Everest Adventure (Azar)
Year one Spring 2	Goldilocks 3 Little Pigs Billy Goats Gruff Gingerbread Man Red Riding Hood	The Runaway train Naughty bus The Train Ride (T4W)	Survivors (Long)  Survivors the toughest creatures on earth (Davies)  Hurricane (Wiesner)  Earth Shattering Events (Williams)	Journeys Boy at the Back of the Class (Rauf) The Explorer (Rundell) The Journey (Sanna)
Year one Summer 1	Jasper’s Beanstalk Titch	What a wonderful world Somebody’s swallowed Stanley Poppy and the Blooms	Currents and Waves  How does a lighthouse work? (Belyaev)  Shark Lady/Manfish (Keating/ Berne)  Kensuke’s Kingdom (Morpurgo)  The Boy who harnessed the wind (Kamkwamba)	Ancient Greece Who Let the Gods Out (Evans) A Journey Through Greek Myths (Ward and Berg)
Year one Summer 2	Bog Baby Sharing a shell Barry the Fish with fingers Shark in the park Commotion in the Ocean	Take the weather with you The Wind Blew Storm	Romans  Roman Myths (Namm)  Julius Zebra Rumble with Romans (Northfield)  Most wanted (Kate Thompson)  Escape from Pompeii (Balit)	Ancient Greece The fastest Boy (Laird) Percy Jackson (Riordan)

 

Year two

Year / Term	Nursery	Reception / KS1	LKS2	UKS2
Year two Autumn 1	Leaf Man  Red Leaf, Yellow Leaf  Stanley’s Stick Tree Squirrels that squabbled The Leaf Thief We’re going on a Leaf Hunt In Every House in Every Street The Suitcase Kind	People and their communities The Bear & the Piano	Crime and Punishment   The Highway Rat (Donaldson)  Dick Turpin: Legend and Lies (Deary)  Gangster Schools (Wiseman)	Vikings Odd and the Frost Giants (Gaiman) Norse Myths (Crossley-Holland) DKfindout! Vikings (Steele)
Year two Autumn 2	10,9,8 Owls up late! The Colour Monster	The Great Fire of London Toby and The Great Fire of London Fireman Piggy Wiggy No Dragons for Tea The Jolly Christmas Postman Mog's Christmas	Road Trip/Journeys  The North Star (Reynolds)  Paddington Bear (Bond)	Dragons How to Train Your Dragon (Cowell) The Land of Roar (McLachlan) Dragonology (Drake)
Year two Spring 1	Hickory Dickory Dock  Incy Wincy Spider  Grand Old Duke of York  Baa Baa Black Sheep  Dear Mother Goose After Fall	Animals and their habitats Tad	The Egyptians  The Magic and the Mummy (Deary)  DK Findout Ancient Egypt (DK)  Egypt Magnified (Long)	Maya The Great Kapok Tree (Cherry) Rain Player (Wisniewski) The Chocolate Tree: A Mayan Folktale
Year two Spring 2	Dear Zoo Over in the Meadow Little Rabbit Foo Foo Bear Hunt Cockamoomoo! Cows in the Kitchen	Intrepid explorers Poles Apart Journey Lost and found Follow That Map	The Egyptians   A River (Martin)  Egyptian Cinderella (Climo)	The Amazon The Explorer (Rundell) Journey to the River Sea Amazon Adventure Unfolding Journeys
Year two Summer 1	Jasper’s Beanstalk  Titch  Pass the Jam Jim Muncha Muncha Muncha Hungry Caterpillar Cake!	Where does our food come from? Oliver’s fruit and veg Secrets of the garden Eat Your Peas Green Eggs and Ham	The World Around Us  Ask Dr Fisher about Planet Earth (Llewellyn)  Destination Planet Earth (Nelson)	Space The Jamie Drake Equation (Edge) Hidden Figures (Shetterly) Dr Maggie's Grand Tour of the Solar System
Year two Summer 2	Goldilocks  3 Little Pigs  Billy Goats Gruff  Gingerbread Man  Red Riding Hood Dinosaur Dept Store If you see a Dinosaur Dinosaur Roar  Texts may change depending on children’s interests	We’re all going on a summer holiday Flotsam The lighthouse keepers lunch (T4W) Billy’s Bucket The Singing Mermaid	The World Around Us  If the World were a Village (Smith)  How to Change the World (Sirdeshpande)  Shackleton’s journey (Grill)	Looking to the future No one is too small (Thunberg) Rain before Rainbows The Last Tree (Chabbert

 

Whole School VIPERS Reading Progression Framework

	Vocabulary	Infer	Predict	Explain	Retrieve	Summarise
EYFS	Demonstrate understanding when talking with others about what they have read (ELG: Reading)	Uses illustrations to support understanding of texts read.	Listens to stories and anticipates key events (ELG: Listening and attention)		Identifies title.   Makes connections between texts.	Retells known stories in a variety of ways (e.g. small world, role play, story maps etc.)
Year 1	Identifies simple recurring literary language.	Makes links from the text to own experiences.	Predicts events and endings.		Recognises patterns in texts (e.g. repetitive language).	Identifies the beginning, middle and end in stories.
		Makes simple inferences about characters’ actions.	Reviews cover to predict book content.		Recognises the differences between different genres e.g. fiction and non - fiction.	Identifies contents and index in non - fiction texts.
Year 2	Discusses effective language or layout (non - fiction choices).	Identifies goals/motives of the main character based on what they have said or done.	Predicts key events in a story using information such as setting and genre.		Retrieves key information from a text.	Identifies the sequence of events in a story.
		Demonstrates empathy with characters.	Offers alternative plotlines or endings.		Understands layout and organisational features of non - fiction texts.
		Justifies opinions using evidence from the text.			Refers back to the text for evidence.
Year 3	Identifies and discusses new vocabulary	Suggests reasons for actions and events and justifies their views by referring to the text.	Makes predictions using evidence from the text.	Begins to evaluate effectiveness of texts, including effective vocabulary choices.	Uses contents page and index to locate information in non - fiction texts.	Summarises the main idea or theme of the text, including non - fiction.
		Infers characters’ feelings based on evidence from the text.			Refers directly to text when responding.
		Identifies how settings are used to create atmosphere.
Year 4	Infers meaning of unfamiliar words.	Reasons about characters’ feelings by referring to dialogue.	Predicts characters’ behaviours based on mood/atmosphere.	Identifies different sentence constructions and their impact on the reader.	Retrieves information from the text when there is distracting information.	Justifies their opinion of a whole text using evidence from different parts of the text.
	Identifies descriptive vocabulary and its impact on the reader.	Distinguishes between fact and opinion.
		Identifies techniques used by the author to make the reader feel sympathy/dislike etc.
Year 5	Uses a range of strategies to infer the meaning of unfamiliar words.	Discuss how characters change over the course of a story and reasons why using evidence from the text.	Adjusts initial predictions based on new evidence and explains why.	Identifies whether a text presents a balanced or biased argument/viewpoint.	Retrieves information from multiple places within a text.	Analyses the different structures of fiction and non - fiction texts, noting similarities and differences.
	Identifies effective vocabulary (including figurative language and sentence constructions) and their impact on the reader.	Discusses the impact of time and place (setting) on characters’ behavior and plot.		Identifies different perspectives on one issue in a non - fiction text.	Make informed decisions regarding the relevance of different sections in non - fiction books when looking for specific information.
Year 6	Analyses the impact of particular language techniques used (e.g. figurative language, sentence construction etc.)	Explains the author’s intentions using evidence from the text (e.g. to persuade in a non - fiction text; to create an emotional response to a character or setting in a fiction text).	Explains whether developments in plot/character met or challenged their expectations.	Explains whether they agree or disagree with the point of view expressed in the text, drawing on evidence to support their argument.	Identifies how points are linked and sequenced in non - fiction texts.
				Explains how their feelings towards a particular character have changed over the course of a story	Discusses how text layout and organisational devices impact on the read in non - fiction texts.	Summarises the relationship between characters at different points in the story using evidence from the text e.g. dialogue.

 

CLPE Reading Progression

Introduction

At Grove Road Community Primary School we strive to ensure that all children become successful, fluent readers and writers by the end of Key Stage One and believe this is achievable through a combination of strong, high quality, systematic, discrete phonics teaching combined with a whole language approach that promotes a ‘Reading / Writing for Pleasure’ culture.

The National Curriculum (2014) and Rose Report (2006) emphasise high quality phonics as an important part of the word decoding skills required by children to develop higher level whole language and comprehension skills. This approach is in alignment with our belief that we first ‘learn to read’ and then ‘read to learn’. Alongside this there is an expectation that children use phonics to underpin their spelling when writing, including words containing ‘unusual’ GPCs (grapheme-phoneme correspondences) and ‘common exception words’. This policy is aimed at reinforcing a consistent, high quality approach to the teaching of phonics across the EYFS (Early Years Foundation Stage) Key Stage One and on into Key Stage Two for children who still need this further support.

Aims

• To teach children aural discrimination, phonemic awareness and rhyme to aid reading, writing and spelling development.
• To encourage the use of segmenting and blending so that decoding skills provide a sound foundation for reading, writing and spelling.
• To ensure the teaching of phonics is lively, interactive and game based.
• To enable children to use phonic awareness across the curriculum.
• To ensure that children know the 44 phonemes within the English language.
• To teach children to recognise the graphemes within words and associate them with the appropriate phoneme when reading and spelling.
• To provide children with strategies to identify and decode ‘tricky words.’

 

Objectives

• To provide consistent, high quality phonics teaching that ensures all children have a strong foundation upon which to confidently tackle the complex processes of reading and writing.
• To ensure that the teaching of synthetic phonics is systematic and progressive throughout the Foundation Stage, Key Stage one and Key Stage two for those children needing interventions to support phonetic knowledge and understanding.
• To ensure that children have sound phonetic knowledge, understanding and skills so that they can decode words confidently and engage with higher order reading and writing skills.

Curriculum, Teaching and Learning Guidance

At Grove Road Community Primary School we follow the National Curriculum and we use the DfE validated scheme, ‘Monster Phonics’ across the EYFS and Key Stage One. This is a multi-sensory approach used to provide meaningful, interactive learning by catering for all children’s needs. In Key Stage 2 ‘Monster Phonics’ interventions are led by the intervention team of Learning Support Assistants. Children identified for intervention include children who haven’t passed the Phonics Screening Check, children who are new to English, children with specific SEND needs and children who cannot access ‘Spelling Shed’ (our Spelling programme used in Year 2 onwards) in their own classroom. Teachers use assessment to inform effective provision for all children, using this to plan and deliver well differentiated lessons that engage and challenge all children within the lesson. This assessment should inform the rate at which children progress through the phases and secure a sound understanding of phonics.

All Year One children take the ‘Phonics Screening Check’ - a statutory assessment required by legislation. Those who do not meet the pass mark will be given support and intervention time in Year Two to provide them with sufficient knowledge and understanding to re-take the ‘Phonics Screening Check’ and obtain a pass mark. Those children who do not obtain the required level set by the ‘Phonics Screening Check’ will receive phonics intervention in Year Three and throughout their time in Key Stage 2 where required.

Planning for phonics will be done separately from Literacy but with the understanding that good phonics teaching should link to the literacy needs of the children within a Literacy lesson and across the curriculum. Each phonics lesson should include the following sections:

• Revisit / review – Overlearn the previous graphemes and words
• Teach – Introduce a new grapheme / words
• Practise – Develop GPCs (grapheme phoneme correspondences) /read and spell new words
• Apply – Use the new graphemes / words in games and activities to secure knowledge
• Further application – Apply phonic skills in future reading / writing tasks including those in other curriculum areas.

 

Organisation

Children in Nursery should be taught Phase 1 though a differentiated approach within the setting on a daily basis. Children will be introduced to Phase 2 by the end of their time in Nursery through 15 minute inputs and this will be consolidated on entry to Reception. Phase 2 will commence in Reception by Week 4 of the Autumn 1 term. Children will progress on to Phases 3 and 4 in Reception and this will be consolidated on entry to Key Stage 1. In Year 1, following consolidation of Phases 2, 3 and 4, the children will progress on to Phase 5 on a sound per day basis. The aim will be for children to be ready to engage with Phase 6 phonics / Spelling Shed upon entry to Year 2. Phases 2-5 will continue to be explicitly taught in Year 2 for those who failed the screening test / late entry children and the rest of the Year 2 cohort will progress on to specific Spelling, Punctuation and Grammar (SPAG) work detailed in the School’s English Strategy.

Children in Reception, Year 1 and Year 2 (those still requiring phonics support and teaching) will be taught a discrete phonics session daily for a thirty minute period as a whole class. This is supported by specific phonic based tasks in classroom provision, such as writing captions or labels. Phonics skills are also embedded in writing and reading tasks in Literacy sessions.

Groups will be differentiated to ensure that all children are reaching their full potential within a challenging and supportive environment. Children are introduced to the “tricky words” and aim to read and write the high frequency words for Phases 2 to 4 before they enter Year 1.

Children in Key Stage 2 who have not attained a sufficient skill level in GPC awareness and application will have provision in small intervention groups in regards to Phonics and/or Spelling across the key stage.

 

Classroom Environment

In each EYFS and Key Stage 1 classroom is an age appropriate phonics display, concentrating on both sounds and key words individually and in context. Newly taught sounds will be clearly evident in classroom provision and staff will model / scaffold the application of new and previously taught sounds throughout their interactions with children (e.g. segmenting and blending to spell in a writing session). Words in the environment using recently taught sounds will have ‘sound buttons’ or be laid out in phoneme frames where required to support children with accessing or reading them independently.

Parental Involvement

An introduction to Phonics and Reading talk will be held in the Autumn term for all parents and ‘Stay and Play’ phonics sessions will also occur throughout the year to support with parental understanding, involvement and engagement with supporting their child with reading at home. Parents will also be signposted to ‘Monster Phonics’ webinars that are held online throughout the year.

Assessment

Teacher assessment will support with grouping in EYFS for phonics inputs and in KS1 screening test mocks will be completed termly to support with grouping following a baseline screening test completed in Autumn 1. Alongside this Star Early Literacy assessments and mock SATS papers will be delivered alongside teacher assessment of reading and writing to support pitching learning and targeting interventions in Key Stage 1.

 

In Early Years and Year 1, the children will be learning how to read and spell mainly through learning phonics. From Year 2 upwards, we begin to teach children how to spell using different strategies, through our spelling programme 'No-Nonsense Spelling'.
Our teachers deliver daily spelling lessons and we teach children how to spell using different strategies. We give the children approximately 5 spellings each week to practise during lessons and at home - these are words they have been finding tricky when writing in class. We believe in learning spellings in a practical, specific way, with research indicating that these strategies are much more powerful than traditional methods of learning spellings by rote. 
The learning strategies on the pages below are introduced incrementally throughout our spelling programme and can then be used to support learning spellings at home.

Please look at our No-Nonsense Spelling Pathway for Years 2-6 below.

No Nonsense Spelling Pathway

Our School in Books

Reading diverse, inclusive compilations of books is one of the key foundations of our children’s learning journey here at Grove Road. Children should see books as windows to look through into other worlds, as doors to intrepidly step through into new environments and as mirrors within which they can see their wonderfully unique selves reflected back. Below, we have pulled together a short list of books that we feel represent our school and what we believe we offer to our fabulous children and the wider community. Please speak to your child’s class teacher or our Lead Reader, Mr Harrison, if you would like to borrow any of these to share at home.

Emmett and Caleb by Karen Hottois and Delphine Renon Love takes many forms and we believe each and every unique relationship should be celebrated. The best relationships are rooted in kindness, empathy and mutual respect, just like Emmett and Caleb’s relationship in this wonderful book. We also believe that every child has their own strengths and passions and that through collaboration we can share these with others whilst discovering more about what makes them awesome.
	The Journey by Francesca Sanna: We are a ‘School of Sanctuary’, meaning that we are committed to “supporting the thousands of young people seeking sanctuary in the UK, creating a culture of welcome, and raising awareness of the issues faced by refugees and asylum seekers” (https://schools.cityofsanctuary.org/). The Journey ends with the family looking into the future with a mixture of trepidation and optimism: we imagine our school lying over the next hill, ready to welcome them into our community with open arms.
I Speak Like the River by Jordan Scott and Sydney Smith: Everyone, even the quietest individuals, have their own unique voice and we do everything we can to create an environment where they can share it in their own wonderful way. Our specialist on-site unit provides an incredible level of care for very high need, vulnerable children who thrive when they come to us. We understand that, like a river, we often need quieter and louder times and we appreciate that everybody needs to create and travel along their own bespoke path to success.
	Yokki and the Parno Gry by Richard O’Neill, Katharine Quarmby and Marieke Nelissen: Stories are our lifeblood, they’re at the heart of everything we teach, and we love to hear the stories behind our children and their families. Every unit we teach is underpinned by our diverse book spines and we love seeing our children look through books as windows or as mirrors, through which they can see new worlds or begin to understand themselves more deeply.
Maia and What Matters by Tine Mortier and Kaatje Vermiere: There is so much beauty in the world, but also a lot of sadness – especially at the moment. We don’t shy away from the nitty gritty and those tough conversations, these are the times where children can really open up and discover who they are. We see the greatest levels of beauty and love in the relationships around us, so we put them at the heart of everything we do.
	Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterley, Winifred Conkling and Laura Freeman: As a school, we genuinely believe that everyone has the capacity to change the world. It is our duty as educators to help children to realise their potential and to thrive, becoming leaders of change and ambassadors of kindness within the community on a local, national and global scale.
Malamander by Thomas Taylor: Everyone needs to find themselves, but often we need a helping hand: we educators are the Lost and Founders, just like young Herbie. We see beauty in the eye of the storm clouds that can often surround troubled youngsters and we weather those storms together. We also love trying to solve a good mystery!
	The House with Chicken Legs by Sophie Anderson: Magic and mystery lies at the heart of our experience-led curriculum. We all love surprises, from wooly mammoth stampedes to burning bakeries, and the learning that comes from these experiences is invaluable. We also love exploring the cultures and communities within our diverse school, especially when we get to learn exciting new things! Our school building also has its own weird and wonderful personality, just visit and you will see!
The Midnight Guardians by Ross Montgomery: Us teachers are so protective of our children. Sometimes we suit up in our armour and fight dragons, sometimes we sniff out challenges and sometimes we grow to our greatest size to give big cuddles when they’re needed (albeit from a distance at present!)
	Amari and the Night Brothers by B. B. Alston: This book really celebrates how people can be so much more than they first seem on the surface and how we never give up on each other! Family and friends come first and success comes through hard work and loving what we do. In our school, we believe that every member of our community has an incredible amount of potential and that everyone is an expert in something.
Orion Lost by Alastair Chisholm: We couldn’t resist including this, simply because we’re immersed in a world of technology that doesn’t always work the first time! Well, that and it shows that children can do so much more when they’re trusted and respected to take on challenges!