English

English is taught every day as outlined in our Teaching & Learning policy and the National Curriculum.

We aim for all our children to be competent readers, writers, speakers and listeners. Children are encouraged to read for pleasure and also for information with the aim of developing comprehension skills as expected in the Primary National Strategy. Children are encouraged to take home reading books from the class and also from our well stocked library. A reading scheme has been adopted within the school to develop the children’s skills and confidence.

Children are introduced to different types of writing for different audiences. Spelling, punctuation, handwriting and grammar are also taught discretely, so that the children may then develop these skills within their own writing. 

We follow the Write Stuff model for teaching writing. It works in the following ways:

The Write Stuff is based on two guiding principles; teaching sequences that slide between experience days and sentence stacking lessons. With modelling at the heart of them, the sentence stacking lessons are broken into bite-sized chunks and taught under the structural framework of The Writing Rainbow. Teachers prepare children for writing by modelling the ideas, grammar or techniques of writing.

Key benefits of The Write Stuff:

• Support for teachers so that they have a deeper and more flexible knowledge of sentence structure.
• Pupils who understand how to apply sentence scaffolds to their independent writing as they develop their expertise.
• Standards improve because many worked examples are provided over the year that extend understanding through a wide range of genres and non-fiction text types.
• Children have a clear view of what high quality writing looks like and their learning is structured clearly and misconceptions dealt with.
• Pupils know how to improve their writing and make it more focussed and actionable feedback is provided to guide their learning.
• Children have a concept of how to build, plan and complete a piece of writing due to narrative maps and non-fiction shapes.
• Teachers have clear pathways of how to guide pupils in weak areas such as cohesion and paragraphs.

Here are links to our long-term plans for writing across each year group which ensure that all the genres of writing are taught across the Key Stage: