English
Intent:
We believe English is at the heart of children’s learning and an essential part of the culture of our schools. Through a purposeful and engaging English curriculum, we inspire children to develop the skills and knowledge that are needed to make the most of opportunities across the curriculum and beyond school.
We strive to embed a life-long love of reading and writing through the use of quality texts and topics. As readers and writers, children are emboldened to appreciate and critique the rich variety of literature, with an understanding of the writing process that has created it. In addition, children are given opportunities to themselves be an author, expressing their creativity and autonomy to compose works to be published and performed. As speakers and listeners, our children are nurtured to be able to express their ideas, discuss, debate, persuade and create opportunities for different purposes.
Implementation:
In order to achieve our intent, English is threaded throughout our curriculum. First and foremost, we ensure that all children are able to read accurately and confidently through the teaching of systematic synthetic phonics. In addition, reading skills are taught explicitly from Reception to Year 6 to develop skills of fact retrieval, inference, summary, prediction, evaluating and comparing. Children read phonically decodable books linked to what they are learning in phonics and move on to Renlearn books which are pitched at the perfect level of challenge. Developing a love of reading in our children is cultivated through a culture of enjoying a range of texts, which is made up of children’s book clubs, regular author visits and daily reading time.
Writing is taught progressively, linked to our curriculum questions and texts, using our writing cycle. We use high quality texts as models for writing, exploring their grammar and punctuation in context in order to innovate our own pieces.
Impact:
Children are enabled to cultivate an understanding of the power of reading, writing, speaking and listening: the capacity to change their own or someone else’s mind or opinion; communicate effectively with others; to examine their own and other’s experiences, feelings and ideas; giving these order and meaning. Children are given the tools and skills to do this through the National Curriculum aims as well as being embedded in our ethos.
Our children take the next steps into the world as courageous, young people who are able to participate fully in society with creativity, purpose, autonomy and vitality of individual expression.