Intent

At St. Mary’s, we are dedicated to inspire a love for both reading and writing through our English curriculum. It is our aim that children will then want to continue to read and write outside of the classroom and across other areas of the curriculum. We also aim to promote high standards of spoken language through the integral use of oracy throughout the curriculum as we recognise that developing a love of language in our children is vital in achieving success at school and later in life.

Writing and reading are at the heart of everything we do here at St. Mary’s. We aim to ensure that all children can read fluently with a good understanding and that we develop a love for literature through the promotion of reading for enjoyment across the school. Within writing, we ensure that children acquire a wide range of vocabulary, an understanding of grammatical rules and that they can write clearly, accurately and coherently. They should then be able to adapt their language and style of writing for a range of contexts, purposes and audiences. At St. Mary’s, we encourage a passion for writing and the development of creative pieces of literature. Through speaking and listening opportunities, we hope that children will be able to elaborate and explain clearly their understanding and ideas and that this will help to develop the children as writers.

Implementation

Our English curriculum is designed to develop children’s knowledge and skills within both reading and writing in order to enhance and enrich learning across all other curriculum areas. The children are made aware that there is a key progression of knowledge and skills within English and are helped to develop these throughout their school career. At St. Mary’s, English is taught through a range of quality and diverse texts covering all genres across the school. Within class, discussions take place to extract key language, develop oracy and develop the understanding of how language is used. Through the studied texts, children explore different styles of writing and how authors write for a specific purpose and audience. Our pupils can then create their own written texts using the skills that they have acquired, not only in English but across other curriculum areas. We use the ‘SpellingShed’ platform to explicitly teach Spelling and Grammar rules, as well as ‘Letter-Join’ to teach a cursive handwriting style.

Impact

Across the school, children show understanding of the skills required to become a successful writer. As they progress through the school, they articulate the types of features present in different text types, the impact of word choices and the grammatical structures used. The impact of English teaching is also measured across the curriculum through the children applying their grammatical knowledge within other subject areas, both orally and within written work. As children progress through the school, children show that they can analyse and edit their own work as well as their peers, demonstrating a deeper level of learning.

Children at St. Mary’s are keen to participate in reading challenges and writing competitions throughout the school year, demonstrating their knowledge and love for English.

Reading Buddies

Pupils from KS2 are assigned a partner class in EYFS and KS1, and they read a story to their reading buddy every Friday. They perform dramas, dances and rhymes based on a given topic/text for special events.

World Book Day/Book Week

To celebrate World Book Day, we hold Character Parades in the morning and do a range of activities and competitions across the school, including a Book Quiz in KS2. Children enjoy a visit from a different teacher in the afternoon, who comes to class to share their favourite story.

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National Poetry Day

Each year we celebrate National Poetry day by learning and performing poetry. Children enter a Key Stage competition and the winners enjoy the opportunity to perform in front of the school during our Star of the Week Friday assemblies.

English, involves key areas:

  • Reading 
  • Writing
  • Speaking and Listening 
  • Grammar and Spelling

Reading

At St. Mary’s we are passionate about reading and we endeavour to make sure that all our children develop a love of reading.

In EYFS and Year 1, reading is taught using the synthetic phonics programme: ‘Little Wandle’. Children have daily phonics sessions, beginning with simple sounds and building up to more complex sound combinations. This means that they learn how to ‘read’ the sounds in words and how those sounds can be written down. This is essential for reading but it also helps children to learn to spell. 

Little Wandle reading practice sessions take place three times a week starting from Week 4 in Reception. These are short sessions, run with a group of four - six children focussing on applying the week’s phonics learning to read decodable books. Session one focuses on retrieval, session two on prosody (intonation and expression) and session three on comprehension.

Across the rest of the school reading skills are taught alongside each class writing text. Each text is used as a stimulus to embed skills in retrieval, inference, prediction, summary and explanation of the author’s intent. In addition to this, Years 2-6 use a resource called ‘Fluent in Five’ which features a variety of fiction, non-fiction and poetry extracts. Each extract is accompanied by a set of comprehension questions which focus on retrieval, vocabulary and inference. Each session lasts around 15 minutes and involves:

  • 2 minute – teacher model read.
  • 6 minutes – children read the text either to an adult or in pairs and then summarise their reading.
  • 7 minutes – answer comprehension questions.

Weekly Library Visits

Children visit the school library weekly and this promotes pleasure for reading. They can relax in the informal setting and enjoy the wide range of books on offer. Teachers will often finish these sessions with a ‘story time’.

Daily Storytime

Each class enjoys a daily storytime with their teacher at the end of the day. These offer children an opportunity to hear a range of texts such as stories, poetry and information books, building their vocabulary in order to help their writing. It also encourages reading for pleasure as children can relax in the reading corner and enjoy the company of their classmates as they are read to.

‘Home Readers’

At St. Mary’s, we operate a home-school reading system so that children can take books home to read with an adult. Each class has a set of ‘Big Cat Collins’ Home readers and children take these home twice weekly. These books are levelled and children progress through a ranked colour scheme as their fluency and comprehension improve. Supporting your child with their daily reading is one of the best ways you can help them and encouraging them to complete a range of activities (art, poetry, reviews, diary entries, character profiles) in their reading journals.

Ideas for reading activities

  • Book review of the text
    • Write a description on what the main idea is, who it was written for (audience), why do you think it was written (purpose), and when it was published.
  • Acrostic poem - from the title of the text or new vocabulary
  • Character description - including pictures
  • Poster advertising the text
  • Rewrite the ending
  • Retell the text in own words
  • Positive and Negative points of the text (could be completed in a Venn diagram)
  • Identify language features used in the text e.g., metaphors/similes, personification, alliteration, repetition etc.
  • Handwriting- take a short extract out of the text and practice your handwriting
  • Create a new cover for the text
  • New vocabulary - keep a list of all the new vocabulary found in the text
  • Create a crossword/word search for the text
  • Diary entry from one of the character’s perspectives
  • Write a biography on the author of the text

These are just a few possible ideas to complete in your reading journal. Remember to keep it fun, creative and tidy.

Here are some tips to encourage and support your child at home:

  • Talk about the story and the characters as you go along.
  • Visit the library and borrow books you enjoy reading together. Choose subjects your child prefers - factual books or stories.
  • Look for words in everyday life, not just books. Read newspaper headlines, shop signs or menus in cafes.
  • Make reading fun
  • Try the Summer Reading Challenge

Writing

Writing is an important tool for learning and plays a vital role in all areas of the curriculum.

At St. Mary’s, children are given many opportunities to write for different purposes and audiences. We aim for a high standard of presentation, and the children follow a cursive style of handwriting throughout the school. Through our teaching we also provide time for planning, editing and revising and encouraging pupils, throughout the process, to read as a writer and write as a reader. Pupils have multiple extended writing outcomes each half term where they publish an independent piece once they have learned the writing features for that specific outcome: narrative, script, persuasive speech, informational text etc.

Grammar and Spelling

At St. Mary’s, we want to make sure that every child learns to be a competent and confident speller. We take a structured approach, using the ‘SpellingShed’ platform, and the children learn and practice not only spelling patterns, but also how they relate to the sounds, thereby giving them the building blocks to be able to spell almost any word.

Spelling follows the National Curriculum spelling rules and a new rule is assigned each week and the spelling homework includes a list of words that apply to the given rule. 

Learning to understand the grammatical structure of the English language is seen as integral to the development of reading and writing skills. Once weekly, children have a Grammar lesson in which they learn grammar concepts connected to their writing outcome. They also ‘retrieve’ previously taught concepts at the beginning of each English lesson via a ‘grammar starter’.

Speaking and Listening

Pupils are encouraged and helped to talk clearly, confidently and with expression in order to communicate their ideas and feelings. They are taught that, to become effective listeners, they need to be attentive and concentrate. Opportunities to develop these skills include presenting to an audience, class discussions, debate, role play and following instructions.