NewickEnglish
Curriculum Aims
Wisdom – Our children will acquire a wide vocabulary, read easily with fluency and good understanding and write accurately and coherently to communicate ideas. We will endeavour to ensure that phonics and early reading provide excellent foundations for building these skills.
Independence - Our children will learn to read widely for both pleasure and information. Through the use of exciting rich texts, we want children to produce unique and inspiring outcomes selecting their own ideas for presentation and genre.
Creativity - Our children will learn to be able to seek opportunities to create, refine and share outcomes with a real audience.
Kindness – Through reading, our children will learn to develop culturally, emotionally, intellectually, socially and spiritually.
English Progression
Click on the blocks below to open our progression documents.
English Policy
Please click below for a copy of our English Policy.
Please follow this link to our phonics page for more information on our Rocket Phonics programme:
Reading Passports
The Newick Reading Passports have been designed to inspire children to read a range of vocabulary rich and aspirational literature, purely for pleasure, as they make their way through school. We have taken time to carefully select the texts for each year group to ensure that children encounter both modern and classic texts; a variety of genres and topics; and characters and themes from diverse backgrounds.
To complete their reading passport for the year, children will need to read at least 6 of their 10 year group texts. Of course, all children learn to read and develop fluency at different rates, and some children might find their year group’s texts too challenging. However, the books can be read aloud by parents and carers, or listened to by audiobook.
When a book has been completed, children answer questions or talk prompts and bring the passport into school for a signature. When they have 6 signatures, they will earn their passport ‘stamp’ for the year.
The school has copies of each text which children can sign out from their class teacher. However, the year group books can also be borrowed from libraries or bought online or in book shops. If parents / carers do purchase any of the books and would like to donate them after children have finished we would be very grateful.
Further Recommended Reading Books
Click on the blocks below to find out what other recommended reading for pleasure books you and your child could read.
Recommended Reads Early YearsRecommended Reads Year 1 Recommended Reads Year 2 Recommended Reads Year 3 Recommended Reads Year 4 Recommended Reads Year 5 Recommended Reads Year 6
Early Chapter Books KS1
Have a look below to see good examples of early and challenging chapter books suitable for KS1 as shared or independent reads.
A List of Recommended First Chapter Books
VIPERS
At Newick, we regularly assess the children’s reading comprehension using VIPERS questions.
What are VIPERS?
VIPERS is an acronym to aid the recall of the 6 reading domains as part of the UK’s reading curriculum. They are the key areas which we feel children need to know and understand in order to improve their comprehension of texts.
VIPERS stands for
Vocabulary
Inference
Prediction
Explanation
Retrieval
Sequence or Summarise
The 6 domains focus on the comprehension aspect of reading and not the mechanics: decoding, fluency, prosody etc. This is covered in our early reading scheme, Rocket Phonics.
If you would like more information on the type of VIPERS questions you can ask your child when listening to them read, please click on the links below:
KS1 VIPERS Questions KS2 VIPERS Questions
Useful Documents
Resources for Parents and Carers
Click on the 'Rocket Phonics' logo below to take you to the Parents Information Page
Phonics FAQ page 
Writing Champions
To inspire and stimulate children to write, every term we will hold a writing collective worship. We will share ideas and prompts that children might like to write about. Any writing done at home can be placed in the box on our Writing Champions display by the library. At these collective worships we will also share and celebrate lots of the writing completed at home and in class.
For Term 5, we have provided the children with three pictures to use as inspiration. They are to choose one of the pictures and create a piece of writing using the question prompts.
Follow the links below to access the pictures:
Underwater Dragon - https://www.onceuponapicture.co.uk/portfolio_page/dragon/
Glowing Girl - https://www.onceuponapicture.co.uk/portfolio_page/glow/
Girl on a House on a Dragon - https://www.onceuponapicture.co.uk/portfolio_page/girl-house-dragon/
All those who enter will receive a writing champions certificate and a special pen!
Writing on Display
