Curriculum Intent
At St John’s we define the curriculum as everything we do to engage pupils, secure learning of specific skills and promote overall development. Pupils at any age or level of development can expect learning activities which are:
- Personalised
- Engaging and motivating
- Meaningful, relevant and focused on preparation for adulthood
Our curriculum framework is used flexibly to teach individual targets derived from the five areas of learning within pupils’ EHCPs. All planning starts from individual pupils’ current strengths, needs and motivators and is designed to develop key skills across a range of contexts to enable learning to be generalised. Through the annual review process and ongoing dialogue, we work in partnership with families and other professionals to work out what is most important and useful to properly prepare our pupils for their adult lives.
If you have any queries please contact sjs@biltt.org
In order to be truly inclusive and accessible for all, our curriculum is now designed around four flexible pathways as set out below.
Curriculum Overview
Topic Overviews
Phonics
St John’s use the ‘Little Wandle Letters and Sounds’ systematic synthetic phonics programme which is an evidence-based programme approved by the Dfe and includes a SEND programme for pupils with complex needs. Alongside our phonics programme, we use carefully matched ‘Big Cat’ decodable reading books for children to apply their phonics knowledge and be able to access high quality texts and read for pleasure later on.
This link will take you to the parents page of the little wandle website.
Little Wandle Letters and Sounds
Supporting Reading at Home
- Children will only read books that are entirely decodable, this means that they should be able to read these books as they already know the code contained within the book.
- We only use pure sounds when decoding words (no ‘uh’ after the sound)
- We want children to practise reading their book 4 times across the week working on these skills:
Decode – sounding out and blending to read the word.
Fluency – reading words with less obvious decoding.
Expression – using intonation and expression to bring the text to life!
We must use pure sounds when we are pronouncing the sounds and supporting children in reading words. If we mispronounce these sounds, we will make reading harder for our children. Please watch the videos below for how to accurately pronounce these sounds.
At the beginning of each academic year, we will hold an information session for parents and carers to find out more about what we do for Phonics, Reading and English at our schools. Please do join us.
More support for parents and carers can be found here:
St John’s School is a UNICEF Bronze Rights Respecting School. Ofsted rated ‘Good Provider’ (September 2023).
Telephone: 01234 345565 – Office Email: sjs@biltt.org
St John’s School is part of Bedford Inclusive Learning and Training Trust
Company Number: 08156641