St Michaels CE Primary School

St Michael’s is a popular school situated in the heart of London, with all the opportunities and challenges that face people living and working in one of the major capitals of the world.

We believe that children thrive in a caring and intellectually stimulating environment with plenty of praise and encouragement.

At St Michael’s we aim to help our children to succeed and gain in confidence so that they contribute to society as skilful and well balanced young people.

St Michael’s C of E Primary School aims to provide a caring, stable, stimulating environment for learning. Staff are committed to ensuring that the children’s time at school is productive and successful. We aim to raise achievement through all aspects of the curriculum; developing self-confidence, motivation, self-reliance and co-operation.

We are committed to equality of opportunity and serve the local community by welcoming children from all backgrounds and faiths. Whilst our ethos is positively Christian, we value and respect the diversity of our community and aim to set all children on life’s path through compassion, thoughtfulness and understanding of one another and respect for one another’s differences. We believe that parents and teachers have a responsibility to ensure that children leave school with:

• good basic skills in English, maths and ICT
• a love of learning
• good social skills
• a sense of responsibility towards society
• the confidence to stand up for themselves
• the knowledge that they are special in God’s eyes

Our school curriculum is founded on four basic principles which underline what we teach and the way we teach at St Michael's. They are:

Broad - It introduces pupils to a wide range of knowledge, understanding and skills.
Balanced - Each part of our curriculum is allocated sufficient time relevant to the children’s age and experience.
Relevant - Subjects are taught in a way that relates to the children’s lives and experience, now and in the future.
Differentiated - What and how the subjects are taught matches pupils’ individual needs, abilities and aptitudes.
Children may be taught as a whole class, in smaller groups or on an individual basis.

English is a core curriculum subject and is taught every day. We use a variety of teaching and learning styles to teach English skills. We aim to develop children’s ability to listen, speak, read and write for a wide range of purposes, including the communication of their ideas, views and feelings. We do this through daily English lessons in which children experience whole-class reading or writing activities, guided group or children independent activities, and whole-class sessions to review and assess progress and learning.

Children are taught a range of strategies in order to help them read, including phonics (the sounds letters make). We use the Letters and Sounds scheme to teach phonics. You can find out more about this scheme if you Google search ‘Letters and Sounds – The Department for Education.’ Discrete phonics lessons are taught daily in Reception, Year 1, Year 2 and Year 3. Children are assessed and then streamed into relevant phases depending on their ability.

Phase 1: Phonics lessons take place daily (this phase is mostly taught in Reception class). Children explore sounds and develop their listening skills.

Phase 2: Phonics lessons take place on 4 days of the week. The Letters and Sounds scheme is used to deliver a progressive programme of word reading skills. By the end of phase 2, many children should be able to read some VC (vowel- consonant) and CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) words and to spell them. They start to learn to read and spell some high frequency ‘tricky’ words.

Phase 3 and 4: Phonics lessons take place on 4 days of the week. Letters and Sounds is the scheme used to deliver a progressive programme of word reading skills. Children begin to read and write one grapheme for each of the 44 phonemes. They blend and segment CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant), CCVC and CVCC words for reading and spelling and use their phonic knowledge when trying to read and write more complex words.

Phase 5 and 6: Phonics lessons take place on 4 days of the week. Letters and Sounds is used to deliver a progressive programme of word reading skills. Children are taught to read words automatically if they are very familiar; decoding them quickly and silently because their sounding and blending routine is now established and to decode them out loud. Children are taught to read 100 of the most frequently occurring words in English.