Core Subjects
The core subjects of our curriculum are Reading, Writing, Phonics & Spelling, Maths and Science.
Core subjects are based heavily on the National Curriculum Programme of Study and the statutory end of key stage frameworks. The school also has a range of tools used to sequence learning opportunities and to monitor pupils’ progress between the key stages, so these are also be used to form learning objectives.
Core subjects are tracked very closely, so teachers ensure that there is evidence that the necessary skills, knowledge and understanding have been secured by the pupils in their class.
Below are more details about the teaching in these subjects:
Writing
Children at Langton write to a very high standard and we are very proud of the high standard and presentation of our pupils’ work. Writing is published in each child’s learning journal which is shared on a termly basis with parents. We believe writing is of such caliber at Langton because of the structured, scaffolded approach we take to teaching writing and because children write based on ‘talk for writing’ and ‘real life’ experiences.
We teach English discretely but core texts linked to the current learning journey are always used as a basis to build the English planning. GPS is taught within the English lessons and also in discrete GPS lessons. The English curriculum is structured using our We Are Wordsmiths planning tool and guidance, developed by our in-school experts and validated externally for quality assurance purposes.
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Reading
Learning to read is a fundamental skill for life. In Reception, children are taught the sounds made by individual, pairs and clusters of letters. They read graded books with strongly patterned language and picture cues. In Reception, Year 1 and the beginning of Year 2, children have regular phonics sessions that assist them to recognise letters, understand the sound they make and blend these sounds together to create words. Letter-sound correspondence is taught through a highly structured synthetic phonic approach. Alongside this they learn to instantly recognise by sight the most common words in the English language. Many of these words are not phonically regular and learning them by heart is vital as they appear so regularly in all the texts they encounter.
To teach early reading we use a validated phonics programme:
As a school, we use VIPERS as a structure during our Guided Reading lessons. This ensures that all children are working towards the same learning objective at the same time. Children who find reading tricky are able to ‘keep up’ rather than ‘catch up’, as the texts used are modelled by the class teacher before completing the related task.
High quality texts are used consistently and teachers are encouraged to use texts which vary in genre, including picture books, non-fiction, poems and visual representations.

Maths

Year 1-6 White Rose Maths curriculum overview
Science
Our aim is to ensure that all pupils:
- develop scientific knowledge and conceptual understanding through the specific disciplines of biology, chemistry and physics
- develop understanding of the nature, processes and methods of science through different types of science enquiries that help them to answer scientific questions about the world around them
- are equipped with the scientific knowledge required to understand the uses and implications of science, today and for the future.
The order of delivery of these topic areas may vary from year to year. Please note that some major topic areas, such as Animals, including Humans, are revisited due to extensive content and the intention to secure progression in pupils’ knowledge and understanding.