If you have any questions about our curriculum, please contact the school directly.

Reading at Bilton Infant School

The phonics and reading scheme we follow is Collins Big Cat.

It provides complete support for early reading development in Reception and Key Stage One, fully aligned to Letters and Sounds Phases 1-6.  Our children have a secure start to reading with 80+ fully decodable books fully aligned to Letters and Sounds which include:

• Fiction and non-fiction books fully aligned to Letters and Sounds for complete practice of all the required phonemes
• Engage pupils with exciting topics written by fantastic authors and supported by high-quality illustrations photographs
• Support pupils in reaching age-related expectations with targeted lesson plans to support the reading of every book 

Reading in Class

Regular teaching and practice supports early readers through highly decodable books for further practice and development. Pupils enjoy practising their decoding skills with engaging stories supported by colourful illustrations and photography, accessing fiction readers and non-fiction readers. In addition to decoding, they practice increasing fluency skills, comprehension skills and expand their vocabulary. 

Phonics at Bilton Infant School

Synthetic phonics is a method of teaching reading which first teaches the letter sounds and then builds up to blending these sounds together to achieve full pronunciation of whole words.  Synthetic phonics teaches the phonemes (sounds) associated with the graphemes (letters).

Sounds are taught on their own and  then blended together (this is called synthesising), all-through-the-word. For example, children might be taught a short vowel sound (e.g. /a/e/i/o/u/) in addition to some consonant sounds (e.g. /s/, /t/, /p/). Then the children are taught words with these sounds (e.g. sat, sit, pat, pit, pot, tap, at, it). They are taught to pronounce each phoneme in a word, then to blend the phonemes together to form the word (e.g. /s/ - /i/ - /t/; "sit").

We teach sounds in all positions of the words( for example /t/ at the beginning of the word "top", but at the end of the word "pit" or in the middle of the word "pitch"), but the emphasis is on all-through-the-word segmenting and blending from the beginning of the programme.

Research evidence has shown that the most effective way to teach phonics is by using one main programme (in our case Collins Big Cat).

We have regular  phonics session where we learn how to read and write using our phonic knowledge.  We play lots of different phonic games which help us understand how phonemes make words and we use words to make sentences.

Spelling at Bilton Infant School

Our spelling framework is based upon Appendix 1: Spelling of the English National Curriculum 2014. Each week the pupils are expected to learn a set of spellings based upon a wide range of spelling patterns and common exception words.

More information can be found below or under our 'Children' tab and 'Class pages'

Mathematics at Bilton Infant School

Our Mathematics Curriculum follows the National Curriculum for Maths 2014.

Below is a copy of our latest calculation policy for parents. This provides a step by step guide on how we approach the teaching of addition, substraction, multifplication and division.