At Queen's Park Infant Academy we work hard to provide a curriculum that is inspiring, engaging and fun, ensuring that we cover all of the important learning that we are required to teach.

Below you will find lots of information about our curriculum. The year group 'stars' will take you to the medium term plans for each year group (the topics they are currently learning about and what is included in them), and the subject icons give the whole school overviews for each subject area. 

At the bottom of the page you will find links to statutory curriculum documents.

Reading and Writing - Supersonic Phonic Friends and Kinetic Letters

At QPIA we have chosen well planned, well resourced, fun ways to teach our children reading and handwriting confidence.

Supersonic Phonic Friends is how we teach our children the sounds of letters and how they work together to make words.

Kinetic Letters is how we strengthen our children's motor skills and help them learn correct and neat letter formation.

Below you will find more information on both Supersonic Phonic Friends and Kinetic Letters.

Kinetic Letters

The Kinetic Letters program is commenced in EYFS and is used throughout the school.  Handwriting sessions are taught to the whole class, with differentiated targets where needed. Additional handwriting and fine and gross motor skills interventions may take place for some children. 

The underlying principles of Kinetic Letters

• Building physical strength underpins handwriting, as poor writing may be due to poor strength.
• Children are not expected to do anything before they are developmentally ready for it.
• The different components of writing are mastered individually before being used in combination.
• Letters are learnt as movements not as visual shapes and movement remains central to developing flow and accuracy.
• When handwriting is automatic, the brain can concentrate on content.
• Reading and writing are a reciprocal process and so strengthening handwriting skills will support reading and writing development as a whole.

As part of this we have been doing lots of activities that will make our bodies stronger for writing. You could try some of these activities at home as well!

• We do some of our writing lying on our tummies, resting on our elbows with our legs out straight; we call this our lying lizard position.
• You can do lots of climbing on apparatus to make children's shoulders strong. You could do this by going on the monkey bars at the park. We are also becoming experts at the ‘plank’ position and floor and chair push ups.
• To make our ‘three friends’ (thumb and first two fingers on our writing hand) strong we have been doing lots of Funky Finger activities; pinching and squeezing activities using rubber bands, pegs, play dough, beads, tweezers and threading activities.

Once the children learn to form the letters, they hear stories about Bounce (brave monkey) and Skip (scared monkey) who help them to know where to start their letters. We use special whiteboards to give the children a prompt to remember this.

Ask your child about Bounce and Skip to find out more!

What are the Kinetic Letter Families?

Each of the families are introduced to the children through stories. The children are also introduced to Bounce and Skip the monkeys when reading these stories. So far our children have learnt the following stories...

The Jumper Family Story

Bounce and Skip spend all day jumping down - bump  from the branches of their tree!

Bounce jumps from the high branch and makes the letter trail for h and b.

Skip jumps from the low branch and makes the letter trail for r, n, m and p.

But....when Skip jumps down to make p, he gets a surprise! Instead of going bump, he falls on down into a pit that has a spider!

He jumps back up, pushing the cobwebs off to make the p letter trail!

The Abracadabra Family Story

Scared monkey Skip finds a magician who waves his wand and shouts 'Abracadabra' and makes lots of different letters appear under the lower branch of the tree.

The magician teaches Skip the magic trick. He shows him that for each of the letters, he can pull around to write c, shout 'Abracadabra' and then magic it into o, a, d, g, q or s.

Skip makes all the letters start from his branch.

The Window Cleaner Family Story

The Monkeys find themselves in a city standing by a shop window!  They watch two window cleaners making marks as they dry the windows.  The pull the squeegees down the windows and flick the water off at the bottom!

The window cleaners let the Brave Monkey climb the ladder, pull the squeegee down the window, bump the ground and flick the water off!  This makes a l  and the t.

Scared Monkey is nervous about climbing the ladder so he stays on the ground and makes an i and u.

How Can I Find Out More About Kinetic Letters?

If you want to know more about Kinetic Letters, please CLICK HERE to access their website.

Statutory Curriculum Information

Below are the links to the national statutory curriculum  documents.