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St Joseph’s Catholic Primary School Intent Statement
At St Joseph’s Catholic Primary School our intent is inspired by our mission statement, which is to ‘Live Life to the Full’. As a Catholic school, the ethos of Catholic education remains at our core, allowing children to develop as their own special person academically, spiritually and emotionally. Children are given the opportunity to live out the gospel values in school, working with the wider community and through charity work.
Our aim is to provide children with a safe, nurturing environment, in which they are encouraged to dream big, aim high and to believe that anything is possible. We want children to leave us as happy and confident young people in pursuit of their own personal excellence and preparing our children with life long skills that lead to being well rounded citizens.
Our curriculum focuses on inspiring and providing opportunities for mastery, creating writers, mathematicians, artists, musicians, historians, geographers, engineers or whatever their hearts desire. Time is available for children to be curious explorers in a wide variety of experiences in order to master curriculum areas and find their skills and talents. Time is given to children to reflect on learning, to review, revise and improve. Our school celebrates and recognises the benefits of outdoor learning – using the Forest School to impact learning and celebrating the environment and community in which we live and learn.
We pride ourselves on knowing that each one of our children is different and special in their own right. We promote an inclusive curriculum to inspire and encourage children to be the very best that they can be. We strive for children to leave St Joseph’s Catholic
Primary School with a happy and healthy heart and mind and the most amazing memories that will last them a life time.
Reading at St Joseph's
Welcome to our 'Reading' section of the website. Through our 'reading rich' environment we aim to create a ‘buzz’ about reading! Whether it be through Phonics, shared reading, library time or Author visits, we want children to leave St Joseph’s Catholic Primary School with a passion for books and a lifelong love of reading.
What is the Lancashire Early Years Reading Quality Mark?
The Reading Award is an opportunity to reflect on and improve your practice and provision using our award materials and training with Mentor support. The self-evaluative reflective tool will support practitioners to fully consider the key skills required for learning and developing within the reading aspect. Enjoying books and reading stories from a very early age is crucial in the development of children. It helps with their ability to understand words, use their imagination and develop their speech, as well as being something they really enjoy. LQA in Early reading encapsulates reading as an integral element of the early years curriculum and builds on children's enjoyment of story and develops practitioners subject knowledge to support effective teaching of reading in the early years. The award is embedded within everyday routines and children's play supporting practitioners to be confident in their subject knowledge and therefore better at recognising learning opportunities in children's play.
Bug Club Phonics
Here at St Joseph's we use Bug Club Phonics to teach our children the fundamental phonic skills to create able readers and writers.
Bug Club Phonics provides;
- A solid foundation in reading for all: Written by the same authors of the Clackmannanshire study, Bug Club Phonics uses the systematic synthetic phonics approach. This heavily influenced current government policy as it was shown to give the best foundation in reading for all children regardless of social and economic background.
- 180 fully decodable readers: With fiction and non-fiction titles from Phases 1 to 5 ensuring children read from books with the sounds they know as they are learning to read.
- Accessible and inclusive phonics teaching: Evidence shows keeping the children together fosters a sense of social inclusion and boosts the performance of children progressing more slowly.
- Meet the requirements for the new Ofsted framework: A detailed analysis so you may be confident in Bug Club Phonics’ ability to support your school in meeting the new requirements.
- Comfortable and confident learners: Videos of well-known CBeebies characters are weaved into lessons and characters, such as the Alphablocks, appear in the books helping to link the children’s home environment with the school.
- A rich and varied reading experience: As part of the Bug Club family you can choose when to weave in readers that aren’t fully decodable to ensure enthusiasm for reading is nurtured.
- Frequent and detailed assessment: In addition to the end of unit and phase summative assessments, appropriate and informal assessment opportunities are offered in the daily lessons and through fun games in the online world.
- Extra help for those who fall behind: Guidance on how to support those who fall behind is provided throughout.
Family Reading Time at St Joseph's
Family Reading Time is a special time where families can read together.
‘When we read together we connect. Together we see the world. Together we see one another.’
A family that reads together stays together. At St Joseph's, parents can come into our library, one morning per week, with their child/ren and read together for 15/20 minutes. A lovely start to the day!
Library Time at St Joseph's
Library time offers children the chance to relax and read for pleasure in a range of different ways.
Reading should not be presented as a chore or duty. It should be offered as a gift.
At St Joseph's, each class has an allocated library slot per week. Here they learn valuable library skills - choosing books that appeal to them, returning books, enjoying quality reading time.
Since 2000, the enormously popular and influential Blue Peter Book Awards have been recognising and celebrating the best authors, the most creative illustrators and the greatest reads for children.
St Joseph’s was selected as one of the twelve schools in the whole of the UK to judge the Blue Peter Book Award 2022!
What an amazing experience for our children to have! We are so proud of our little school!
Our Class 5 spent months reading and discussing the short listed fiction and non-fiction books before sending their votes off to Blue Peter. As a school full of children who love to read, the children thrived during this once in a lifetime opportunity. This was shared with the whole school as class 5 did a presentation to the rest of the school about the books they had been studying so everyone felt involved.
