Our Subjects

Reading is at the heart of everything we do at Sitwell Infants. It is so much more than being able to read what is written on a page. Reading equips children for a place in the world. It feeds their imagination and develops their creativity. It can take them to new places and discover new things. It can forge the identity of their personality and shape the person they become.

It is our intention that every child will be a reader and our ambitious curriculum has been intentionally designed to achieve this. We have a systematic approach to phonics from the moment a child steps foot in our school. As soon as a child is ready, they move onto our comprehension teaching where their understanding of texts is deepened. Underpinning all of this, is nurturing a child’s love of reading; ensuring they have high-quality texts, carefully chosen to engage the children.

As soon as a child enters our early years, they are taught phonics immediately as no time is wasted sending each child on their reading journey. Our children learn to read and write effectively and quickly using the Read Write Inc. Phonics programme.

In Read Write Inc. Phonics we teach children to:

• Decode letter-sound correspondences quickly and effortlessly, using their phonic knowledge and skills
• Read common exception words on sight
• Understand what they read
• Read aloud with fluency and expression
• Spell quickly and easily by segmenting the sounds in words

Read Write Inc. uses a systematic approach to Phonics to help children to learn to read and write. Children learn new sounds daily - these are letters and the most common sound that they make. When they have developed their knowledge of several sounds, they then begin to put these sounds together to make words. This is called blending. Blending is a very important milestone in children's reading because once they can hear the sounds in words and blend the sounds together to make words, they are ready to access books and begin to read independently.

A big part of Phonics involves children initially partaking in oral blending. This is where they are given a series of sounds in quick succession and must orally blend these together to make a word. For example, given the sounds m a t, the child will be able to orally blend these sounds and hear the word mat. Once they are able to do this, they can begin to use this process to read the sounds that printed letters make and blend them together to read the whole word.

In Read Write Inc, oral blending and sounding out is called FRED TALK. Children are introduced to Fred - a puppet who can only speak in sounds (Fred Talk) and must help him to blend his sounds together to make words. Whenever, we sound out, we call this Fred Talk to help the children to remember the process.

As children become more confident in oral blending and blending letters, the next step is called FRED IN YOUR HEAD. This is where the children use their sounding out (Fred Talk) to read words but instead of doing this out loud (orally), they do it mentally. This follows the same process (e.g. d o g -> dog) but takes place internally and so the process is silent. Eventually, children will become much quicker at using Fred in your Head and will no longer need to spend as much time Fred Talking each word; developing fluency in their reading because of this.

In Read Write Inc, children are shown Green words and Red words. Green Words are words which can be read by children using their phonics skills (Fred Talk and Fred in Your Head). Red words are words whose patterns differ and cannot be read accurately using their current phonics skills (for example, the, where 'th' can be read normally but the 'e' makes more of an 'uh' sound). Children learn to read and write these Red (common exception) words by sight so that they do not need to Fred Talk them. In Read Write Inc sessions, children will be given regular access to green and red word flash cards to increase their fluency and ability to sight-read an increasing range of words.

In addition to the above, during Read Write Inc lessons, we teach children to work effectively with a partner to explain and consolidate what they are learning. This provides the teacher with opportunities to assess learning and to pick up on difficulties, such as pupils’ poor articulation, or problems with blending or alphabetic code knowledge.

We group all children homogeneously, according to their progress in reading rather than their writing. This is because it is known that children's progress in writing will lag behind progress in reading, especially for those whose motor skills are less well developed.

Phonics is the building blocks to reading; the tools the children need to decode words. Comprehension is the understanding of the words they are reading.

Once a child has mastered phonics, they are moved onto the scheme Cracking Comprehension. We deliberately chose this as it has high quality texts from such authors as Dick-King Smith, Michael Morpurgo and William Shakespeare. The software also enables teachers to visually explain the process of scanning through a text to find evidence and how to convert that into a full answer.

There are 18 units for each year group that are taught over two weeks. During each unit, children will read the text aloud, read it silently, read it with a partner, echo read, listen to the teacher read and listen to the software’s audio version. A large portion of time is spent looking at new or challenging vocabulary and giving the children strategies to comprehend these words.

RWI and Cracking Comprehension help our children learn to read and understand what they read but to truly develop the love of reading, we believe in our reading principles:

• Adults as reading role models:
  Children look to the adults within schools as their role models. They should see us as readers and we should engage with the children and share our reading habits and our love for reading.

• Engage parents in reading with their child:
  We have carefully designed home reading activities to allow all parents to engage with their child’s reading at home.

• Celebrate children’s reading successes:
  Reading Diaries should be filled in every week and if children read at least three times each week, they get a stamp. Once they have six stamps, they win a prize from Mrs Peart's special reading prize box!
  Free books are given as rewards for a range of events in school, as well as their Christmas present every year. 

• Keep reading high profile all year round:
  Regular assemblies are run by our English leaders, and every Monday assembly is Diversity Assembly, where Mrs Peart shares a book each week linked to an important world issue. 
  Reading Diaries are collected in weekly and stamped to collect prizes. 

• Offer a broad reading diet:
  Children are not going to enjoy every book they read. It is essential we offer a wider range of books that children have access to. We strongly believe there is the right book for even the most reticent of readers.
  We develop 'Recommended Reads' that link with our overall theme each half term. These are available for all classes to choose and read during story time each day. 
  Each year group has a 'Reading Spine' with key texts that staff in school have chosen that we want all children to be exposed to during the year. These books cover a range of genres including poetry, non-fiction, modern picture books, classic picture books and diverse books which ensures our children see themselves represented in stories.

When a child turns 18, they will have spent between 9-13% of their waking life in a classroom. For every hour we have a child in school, their parents have them for ten. The importance of children reading at home is crucial to their development as readers.

Reading Diaries:

At Sitwell Infant School, we had our own reading diary designed and tailored to our needs. The expectation is our children read at least three times a week at home and record it in their diaries. 

Diaries are checked every week by the class teacher or teaching assistant. 

Parent Partnership:

We highly value the parents and carers within our community. We know they want the absolute best for their children and will help anyway they can. We offer support for parents and carers in the following ways:

• Training Videos: regular Read, Write Inc. training for parents to help them support their children at home. Sessions are recorded by the class teachers so parents can access at a time convenient to them.
• Virtual Schools: Once a week, the classroom teachers share a video online with parents that shows the sounds they have been learning that week. These videos are produced by RWI and they are of an incredibly high quality. Children are expected to watch one of these videos a week at home with a parent.

At Sitwell Infant School, we believe that literacy skills have a significant impact upon self-esteem, motivation and aspirations for the future. Being literate enables our children to be proactive in their own learning and to articulate their thoughts.

Our Writing Curriculum

We aim to support your children to become confident and inspired writers through a wide range of activities and teaching methods. Writing is a major part of the curriculum and along with reading, listening and talking, makes a significant contribution to the development of children as thinkers and learners. Here at Sitwell Infants, we are dedicated to promoting creativity through the written word supported by the structured development of grammar and punctuation.

Throughout their time in school, children access to a variety of texts to help them gain more knowledge about creating and learning how to improve their own writing. The close relationship between reading and writing is an important one for us to develop as we feel that it is particularly important for our children to have a clear purpose for their writing and an awareness of the audience for which they are writing.

As well as reading, children will use Read Write Inc. to help them to write letters, words and sentences. The process is similar to blending (how we teach them to read) but works in reverse. This is called SEGMENTING. Segmenting involves thinking of a whole word (e.g. cat) and segmenting it into the individual sounds (and thus letters which make it -e.g. c a t). Again, this initially begins orally as children learn to 'chop up' words in order to hear the individual sounds. The process of segmenting in Read Write Inc is called Fred Fingers.

Children use their Fred Fingers to identify the individual sounds in words. In the early stages, children are given a simple word and are told how many sounds are in that word. They then hold up that amount of fingers (with the palm of their hand facing them so they can see their fingers). As they say their word, they split their word up into individual sounds, using one finger for each sound in sequence (left to right). For example, in the word bag, children would be told that this word has 3 sounds. They would then hold up three fingers and look at them. The next step is to touch their left-most fingers and say the first sound (b). They then move to the next finger and say (a). Finally they touch their next finger and say (g).

As they become more confident at linking letters to sounds and at writing those letters they will become increasingly more and more able to write the words after they use their Fred Fingers. This is the basis of writing using their phonic knowledge. 

Children are supported to develop their writing skills by a range of imaginative starting points including educational visits, visual stimulus and events taking place in school or the wider community. Opportunities for high quality writing are also identified and developed across the wider curriculum. Integrating writing in such a meaningful and engaging way is central to continuing to raise pupil progress in writing and in promoting enthusiastic and independent writers.

As children are taught handwriting and phonics we begin to work on transcription skills. This is where they write simple sentences that only contain sounds that they have been previously taught; so children can fully concentrate on spelling and handwriting; without having to make up sentences first. As they become proficient at transcription; we then move onto composition. This allows children to discuss their ideas and compose their own sentences before they write them down. The compositional aspect is only developed once children have mastered almost all sounds in phonics and have correct letter formation.

Teachers use a variety of approaches to ensure that all children achieve success including modelling and demonstrating, structured writing frames, direct and indirect instruction and collaborative group work. Our aim is always to develop a purposeful curriculum to meet the needs of the whole school learning community.

Children and young people will demonstrate their progress in writing through the degree of independence they show, the organisation and quality of their ideas, their skills in spelling, punctuation and grammar, the match of their writing to audience and the effectiveness of their use of language.

Maths Subject Overview

Maths Long Term Plans

National Curriculum

Sitwell Infant School Calculation Policy

Sitwell Infant School Mathematics Glossary

• In Early years, science is taught through the children learning about the world around them in their learning through play. The Scientific area of learning is concerned with increasing pupils’ knowledge and understanding of our world, and with developing skills associated with science as a process of enquiry. It will develop the natural curiosity of the child, encourage respect for living organisms and the physical environment and provide opportunities for critical evaluation of evidence. 
• Provide children with the ability to develop scientific knowledge and conceptual understanding through the specific disciplines of Biology, Chemistry and Physics.
• Develop understanding of the nature, processes and methods of science through different types of science enquiries that help them to answer scientific questions about the world around them.
• Be equipped with the scientific knowledge required to understand the uses and implications of science, today and for the future. 
• Develop the essential scientific enquiry skills to deepen their scientific knowledge. 
• Use a range of methods to communicate their scientific information and present it in a systematic, scientific manner, including I.C.T., diagrams and charts.
• Develop an enthusiasm and enjoyment of scientific learning and discovery.

• Children are encouraged to ask their own questions and be given opportunities to use their scientific skills and research to discover the answers. This curiosity is celebrated within the classroom.
• Planning involves teachers creating engaging lessons, using resources to aid understanding of conceptual knowledge. Teachers use precise questioning in class to test conceptual knowledge and skills, and assess children regularly to identify those children with gaps in learning and address.
• Working scientifically skills are embedded into lessons to ensure these skills are being developed throughout the children’s school career and new vocabulary and challenging concepts are introduced through direct teaching.

• A fun, engaging science education that provides children with the foundations for understanding the world. Our engagement with the local environment ensures that children learn through varied and first hand experiences of the world around them.
• So much of science lends itself to outdoor learning and so we provide children with opportunities to experience this. Through their learning children have the understanding that science has changed our lives. Children learn the possibilities for careers in science as a result of our community links and connection with national agencies such as the STEM association.

Sitwell Infant School Science Curriculum Map

Working Scientifically

Our Science curriculum provides children with the opportunity to carry out practical investigations that help them to develop their scientific skills. We refer to these skills as working scientifically and enquiry skills. Please see the enquiry skills guide attached for your own reference. The children are familiar with the symbols and practise each skill regularly within their Science sessions.

Science Glossary

National Curriculum

Our computing curriculum is aligned with the National Curriculum in key stage 1 as evidenced by our planning and progression documents. Computing in EYFS is no longer part of the Knowledge and Understanding of the World early learning goal but a Sitwell Infant School we believe it is important for our children to continue to gain basic skills in computing.
Our E safety curriculum follow the RHSE curriculum at a level which is appropriate for the age of our children. This is done in a range of different way using different resources including the Jessie and Friends, National Online Safety Day.

Our curriculum is broken down into the 3 areas computer science, information technology and digital literacy. We also teach a progression of Computing vocabulary to support children in their understanding. We give children access to a wide range of good quality resources and provide cross curricular opportunities for children to apply their Computing knowledge and skills.

Our lessons are broken down into reactivate, teach/facilitate/model, learn together, independent practice and reflect.

• Computer Science. Children are taught block coding in an exciting and hands on manner. Children in EYFS are taught the basic skills and this is then built on through key stage 1.
• Information Technology. Children are taught through a range of different programs to develop their skills. We encourage the children to use IT throughout the curriculum in a purposeful method.
• Digital Literacy. Online safety is taught explicitly each half term based around the Jessie and Friends resources from ThinkUknow, Online Safety Day.

Children are assessed during each half termly block of work by teachers in a range of different ways. These include completed pieces of work which are saved within school, comments made by children in floorbooks and during discussions with the computing lead.  Assessment data is recorded on the half termly subject assessment sheets.

National Curriculum

Computing Curriculum Map

Computing Subject Overview

Sitwell Infant School Geography Overview 2024-2025

National Curriculum

Sitwell Infant School History Overview 2024-2025

National Curriculum

Art Curriculum Map

Art Subject Overview

National Curriculum

Design and Technology Curriculum Map

Design and Technology Subject Overview

National Curriculum

National Curriculum

Our Music Development Plan

Our Music Curriculum Map

Our Music Subject Overview

Physical Education

Our PE Subject Overview

Our PE Curriculum Map