English Curriculum
At our school, we value the importance of effectively teaching the basic skills of spelling, reading and writing across the school.
We focus on basic skills in the mornings with Phonics sessions in Early Years and Key Stage 1 along with 'SPAG' sessions in Key Stage 2, focusing on grammar, punctuation and spelling.
Our pupils also take part in a guided reading session. teachers plan a sequence of activities and support children with their comprehension and understanding of a quality text.
In our English sessions, we concentrate on different genres that may link with the topic the children are studying. As they learn about each genre of writing, children develop their skills and are introduced to certain sentence types and modelled writing processes to enable them to create their own quality pieces of writing. As a school we use the Power of Reading teaching sequences developed by the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education (CLPE). This enables us to fully engage children of all abilities, including those with SEND and/or EAL, with a range of high quality texts.
Intent
We want our children to leave us as fluent speakers, readers and writers to equip them to be lifelong learners. We aim to inspire them with an appreciation of our rich and varied language through the immersion of high quality texts and a confidence to use their imagination through our book-led curriculum. We want the children to apply their creative ideas to a range of writing genres and be able to discuss these effectively with confidence.
Implementation
The national curriculum for English aims to ensure that all pupils:
- read easily, fluently and with good understanding
- develop the habit of reading widely and often, for both pleasure and imagination
- acquire a wide vocabulary, an understanding of grammar and knowledge of linguistic conventions for reading, writing and spoken languge
- appreciate our rich and varied literary heritage
- write clearly, accurately and coherently, adapting their language and style in and for a range of contexts, purposes and audiences
- use discussion in order to learn; they should be able to elaborate and explain clearly their understanding and ideas
- are competent in the arts of speaking and listening, making formal presentations, demonstrating to others and participating in debate
These aims are incorporated across our English lessons and the wider curriculum. Our English curriculum is based around a sequence of high quality texts from the Power of Reading - developed by the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education (CLPE). These sequences include fiction, non-fiction and poetry.
We use Letters and Sounds - a rigorous programme of systematic synthetic phonics, whichprovides children with the tools to decode, before building fluency and the ability to comprehend and question independently. As children move through the school, they are taught to retrieve, summarise, infer, predict, discuss meaning and make comparisons and links.
Impact
We use a variety of strategies to evaluate the knowledge, skills and understanding that our children have gained as they progress throughout the school:
- Regular feedback, marking and gathering pupil voice
- Subject monitoring, including book looks and learning walks
- Regular assessments
- Internal and external moderation of work to ensure secure teacher judgements
- CPD to ensure teacher pedagogy and assessment is secure
Reading
“Leaders prioritise reading well. Pupils are taught phonics in a sensible order and develop their reading skills progressively. ... Any pupils who enter the school mid-year or who fall behind get specialist help to catch up with developing their early reading skills. Pupils enjoy reading for themselves and listening to a variety of texts read aloud by teachers who read with passion and enthusiasm.” ~Ofsted 2019.
Learning to read is central to all learning in school as so much depends on it. We place great emphasis on reading skills from the time children enter our Nursery as it is so important. We want children to develop a lifelong passion for reading, widening their understanding of their own and other cultures and societies. We want to build their emotional intelligence and grow their imagination, becoming independent readers with a deep-rooted love of books.
The children are screened when they enter Reception and again throughout their time in Early Years and Key Stage 1. This means we can identify which phonics group of sounds they need to work on to know how to 'read' and how to sound out words they need to write.
We also read to the children several times a day to ensure that they share our love of books and develop an understanding of different genres, information books, poetry, comics, stories and newspapers. By sharing a wide range of texts, the children build on their vocabulary which helps support their writing.