Spelling at Red Hill

At Red Hill Primary School, we are passionate about English. We promote a love of reading, writing and drama, as well as equipping children with the phonetical, comprehension, spelling, grammar and punctuation skills needed to be adept and fluent readers and writers.

The skills that children are taught in Literacy underpin all other subjects. They enable pupils to communicate and express themselves in all areas of their work. Teachers will always make cross-curricular links wherever appropriate and will plan for pupils to apply the skills, knowledge and understanding that they have acquired during Literacy to other areas of the curriculum.

“As vocabulary increases, teachers should show pupils how to understand the relationships between words, how to understand nuances in meaning, and how to develop their understanding of, and ability to use, figurative language”. (National Curriculum, 2014)

Red Hill spellers

Teachers use the CUSP spelling curriculum to provide in-depth, explicit instruction of the patterns of spelling. Additionally, they learn the etymology and morphology of words. CUSP Spelling is both teacher facing and pupil facing, building consistency in how Spelling is taught across the school and ensuring that all teachers have the deep subject knowledge required to teach the statutory content of the National Curriculum for Spelling. CUSP Spelling is a balanced approach, drawing together knowledge about phonics and vocabulary and pairing this with pattern seeking and reasoning.

We use CUSP to teach spelling at Red Hill. This is a systematic and agile approach to spelling, which is balanced and progressive. The underpinning principles are:

• Spelling concepts
• Pattern seeking
• High Volume engagement with print
• Systematic revisiting
• Additional time given to complex concepts and common errors
• Zoom in to the composition of words
• Spelling and word meaning intrinsically linked
• CUSP principles of instruction