English at Strathmore

At Strathmore, we believe that a quality English curriculum should develop children’s love of reading, writing and discussion.  We have a rigorous and well organised English curriculum that is based on a clear system of progression and provides many purposeful opportunities for children to develop their skills and knowledge.  Our curriculum closely follows the aims of the National Curriculum for English 2014.

To support our children with learning to read and write, we use Little Wandle as a scheme for phonics and ESSENTIALwriting as our English scheme.  Both of these schemes have been chosen as they align to the aims of our curriculum and are best suited to support our pupils in developing the skills needed to be successful and a love of reading and writing.  For more information, please click on our English powerpoint below. 

Phonics at Strathmore

At Strathmore, we teach phonics through a scheme called Little Wandle.  We believe that for all children to become fluent readers and writers, phonics must be taught through a systematic phonics programme.  

Phonics is taught daily for children working at Phases 1-5. Each session will follow the same format of introduce, revisit and review, teach, practise and apply. This ensures that children learn new sounds whilst applying taught sounds to their reading of new words. Children work on decoding, segmenting and blending in every lesson. Children are exposed to and use the correct subject specific technical vocabulary (such as phoneme, digraph, trigraph). These children have an additional 3 reading practise sessions per week, to help build fluency in decoding. 

Parent Support

Here is a link to the 'For Parents' section of the Little Wandle website.   

The resources on this page will help you support your child with saying their phonemes (sounds) and writing their graphemes (letters).  This page has a wealth of resources to support you at home, including videos that share how we teach Little Wandle, progression documents and nursery rhymes for children accessing our Foundation to phonics sessions.  

We hold annual Phonics Workshops to encourage all parents and carers to support their children with phonics at home.  Please click below to see the workshop slides, if you have any questions, please as to speak to your child's class teacher. 

Handwriting at Strathmore

At Strathmore, we use the letter formation guides in Little Wandle and the handwriting scheme Letterjoin to teach handwriting