English

Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s

-Stephen King

You can make anything by writing

-C.S. Lewis

Write like it matters and it will

-Libba Bray

English

Our Vision:

Through delivering an engaging and diverse English curriculum, we intend to ensure that children leave Woodlands as effective communicators, accomplished readers and purposeful writers.

We have a book led English curriculum that continues to evolve to suit the needs of our children and the changing world around them using high quality and varied texts to provide a stimulus to explore different genres and develop literacy skills. We use books that have cross curricular links and explore historical, cultural, emotional and social issues allowing children to express their ideas and contextualise real world issues. In addition to this, we explore whole school books where children across the year groups study the same text in depth, and use it as inspiration for different writing outcomes. Through whole class, individual and group reading, teachers nurture and model the value of reading, aiming to develop a love of books and a habit of reading widely and often.

As children progress, they are taught the importance of having a clear audience and purpose when communicating. We aim to teach them the importance of expressing themselves with clarity and equip children with the vocabulary in order to achieve this. We recognise the importance of nurturing a culture where children take pride and ownership of their writing: children are taught to spell correctly and write grammatically correct sentences reflecting and adapting their language and style for a range of contexts. We want children to be proud, enthusiastic learners and endeavour to provide an interesting and rich experience of literature in its many forms including drama and visual media.

How do we teach reading?

From Nursery – Year 2, children learn to read through discrete phonics using the Read, Write Inc scheme. (See phonics for further details)

Once children have mastered phonics, in Year 3-6 we have daily reading sessions where the whole class studies an age-appropriate, quality text over the course of a week.  During this time, children develop fluency in reading and are given the opportunity to read aloud daily. Numerous studies conducted over the past several decades have found that ‘repeated reading’ (where children re-read the same text multiple times) is effective for improving fluency among typically developing children and children with reading difficulties.  It is also essential that children hear a good model of pronunciation, expression, pace and intonation from their teacher.Several strategies are utilised to provide the opportunity to practise reading aloud: echo reading, choral reading and/or paired reading.  As well as reading fluently, children are taught to answer a range of comprehension questions to promote literal thinking, deductive reasoning, inferential skills and the evaluative assessment of texts.We are also participating in the ‘Are You Really Reading?’ project which enhances our reading practise across the curriculum. This tool serves to equip pupils with the skills to read for meaning and this will in turn instil a love of reading for pleasure. The ‘Are You Really Reading?’ toolkit consists of 5 strands:

• Using timelines to record 5 significant events that summarise what has been read in order to develop chronological understanding of a text

• Using short summaries or hashtags to summarise what has been read (in 6 words or less) whilst having fun with language in the development of puns etc.

• Using emojis to infer how characters feel and justify with evidence from the text

• Scaffolding children’s ability to summarise their impression and support answers with evidence from the text

• Identifying the 5 most important events/themes/examples of dialogue

  We build these elements into our reading lessons and into our English lessons when introducing a new text.  In addition, we utilise the techniques in a range of other subjects to develop understanding.

How do we teach writing?

We aim to develop children’s skills in transcription(spelling and handwriting) and composition (articulating ideas and structuring them in speech and writing) through engaging lessons with an exciting stimulus.  Children are taught to write for different purposes and for different audiences, and have regular opportunities to write at length. We embark on a reading to writing journey, where pupils are immersed in a text (sometimes a digital text) allowing them to truly understand, analyse and evaluate the content. Activities are planned to allow children to collect and develop vocabulary which links to the text. Utilising this vocabulary, they can then experiment with constructing sentences of different kinds. Grammar and punctuation are embedded during this process. Pupils are given time to plan their ideas for longer written pieces before putting into practise all of the skills they have been building over the course of the unit in order to produce a coherent, quality piece of writing. We teach editing skills and build time for children to edit their work and, on occasion, re-draft and possibly publish.

Discrete handwriting lessons are taught in addition to the English lesson and pupils are given small activities to practise their new skills throughout the week. Children are then expected to apply these skills in all of their written work.  From foundation stage to the end of Key Stage One, the teaching of handwriting forms part of the Read, Write, Inc phonics scheme and children take part in a range of other activities to develop their fine motor skills. In Key Stage 2, children are taught to join letters in a continuous cursive style.

Although spelling is practised and embedded during English lessons, discrete lessons are used to teach spelling patterns and regular, short activities are then built in over the course of a week which allow children to practise these spellings. The spelling pattern and examples of words which follow this pattern, are shared with parents using Google Classroom. A spelling check takes place each Friday to allow both children and teachers to gauge whether the new spelling patterns have been learnt and committed to memory. From foundation stage to the end of Key Stage One, the teaching of spelling forms part of the Read, Write, Inc phonics scheme.