At Hotwells Primary School we promote a love of reading and writing and develop children's confidence and ability to express themselves and their ideas clearly. We recognise the importance to children of using their literacy skills in a variety of contexts, including for pleasure and in their working lives.

The Reading Curriculum at Hotwells

At Hotwells, we recognise the importance of Reading and know that it underpins everything. We want our children to leave Hotwells as fluent, confident readers with a developed passion and love for books.

We follow Unlocking Letters and Sounds for our synthetic phonics programme. We teach phonic awareness to help the development of reading and writing by segmenting and blending sounds. We also use focused reading groups encompassing a large variety of fiction and non-fiction texts. We support early reading with regular one-to-one reading interventions to develop children's comprehension skills and to foster a love of stories and storytelling, and information gathering.

As children move into Key Stage 1 and Key Stage 2, they are taught explicit reading lessons following the CUSP Reading curriculum. As part of this, children are exposed to a wide range of high-quality and diverse texts. These are carefully selected to enable them to develop as readers whilst maintaining a positive attitude to reading.

Click here to view our Curriculum Statement for Reading.

The Writing Curriculum at Hotwells

At Hotwells, we follow a rich, skills driven English curriculum which has proven success. We are extremely proud of our Try It, Use It, Prove It approach to writing.

Teachers plan their writing units around a high-quality text which is carefully chosen to engage and inspire the children so that they produce high quality writing. A range of genres, both narrative and non-fiction are taught throughout each year which demonstrate a clear progression of skills and features and through a range of short burst writing opportunities, the children are constantly revisiting previously taught text types.

Click here to view our Curriculum Statement for Writing.

Click here to find out how we make English accessible for children with SEND.