English

To help us develop confident, enthusiastic and inspired writers who can express themselves in a variety of different styles and across a variety of contexts, we follow ‘Pathways to Write’ to ensure we give our children a wide range of writing opportunities, with grammar woven throughout by ensuring exposure to a wealth of mapped reading texts.

For reading, Key Stage 1 follows ‘First Class Phonics’ and their daily guided reading sessions link to this to ensure opportunities for application. Key Stage 2 follows the Grammasaurus guided reading format. It has been designed to maximise opportunities for daily, weekly and monthly review to ensure new vocabulary, concepts and knowledge are encoded into long-term memory.

For spelling, we follow ‘Spelling Shed’ to deliver effective spelling lessons that focus on research-backed approaches. This means teaching strategies rather than asking children to memorise them. These strategies include direct instruction, word study and practice. Spelling Shed lists were developed by applying the Science of Reading research and follow a systematic progression of phonics and word study skills typically addressed in each Stage.

Our English curriculum has been shaped by our curriculum drivers: Retention of Long-Term Knowledge, Vocabulary, Oracy, Cultural Capital and Life Skills. We have developed and structured lessons to ensure regular opportunities for oracy. These opportunities enable our children to become immersed through a well thought out exploration of the themes generated by our exciting and vocabulary rich texts. The texts used across year groups have been carefully curated to ensure our pupils are exposed to a wealth of both contemporary and classic texts, texts that develop cultural capital by ensuring coverage of a wide range of themes and topics.

Writing tasks are specific and meaningful, and often meet a purpose to engage children and to illustrate how their writing skills can be applied to real life contexts. The curriculum strengthens teachers’ knowledge of English by enabling them to immerse children in an approach that clearly shows how to teach reading effectively and how reading and writing are inextricably linked. The root of promoting reading and writing in schools is through a rich reading curriculum.

This has a strong beginning in Early Years, where we strive to foster a love for stories. Weekly learning is built around a carefully selected story with high quality text from celebrated authors. Children learn to love familiar characters from modern classic stories that feature rhyming and predictable text patterns, supported by a planned cycle of vocabulary progression. The settings in the stories help to provide opportunities to learn about local and worldwide geography, history and cultural differences, promoting curiosity and helping to set foundations for speaking and listening. This approach reflects the natural curiosity of young children and helps them develop their wider understanding of stories, characters and inference through the language and pictures, in preparation for a successful transition into Key Stage 1.