What does this look like in English?
At Our Lady and St Teresa’s Catholic Primary School, we equip our children with the skills and talents to become lifelong learners; we offer a curriculum that is aspirational, achievement driven and inclusive for all learners. This is achieved through the fulfilment of statutory requirements coupled with rich and purposeful learning opportunities such as school trips, author visits and visiting local theatre productions.
English encompasses both reading and writing, which are fundamental skills for everyone to achieve in life. It is incredibly important, creative discipline that helps us to understand and be a part of our world. At Our Lady and St Teresa’s, we want all pupils to enjoy a love and a passion for reading and become skilled and confident writers which will aid them in achieving their future aspirations in life.
At Our Lady and St Teresa’s, we foster a learning environment that does not limit our children, believing all children can achieve in English, and we work alongside our children to help them read and write confidently as well as become confident communicators of their thoughts, feelings and ideas. We use a wide range of teaching techniques which will allow children to exercise and practice their verbal literacy and fluency as well as their ability to read and write effectively.
Enrichment activities such as school trips and yearly trips to the theatre help build upon students own culture capital. These trips are closely linked to English and topic and inform part of their writing outcomes in both subjects, promoting strong cross-curricular links to deepen learning.
Curriculum Intent:
Through our broad and balanced curriculum planning, we will help immerse our children in the richness of the English language, providing them with opportunities to listen to, speak, perform, analyse and create their own interpretations of texts studied. We want our children to become readers, writers, editors and performers and they will engage in a wide range of activities which give them time and space to allow them to develop the myriad of skills needed to become confident and skilled readers and writers.
We aim for all pupils to:
Curriculum Implementation:
Early Reading – Phonics:
Children are taught systematic synthetic phonics in daily phonics lessons, following the school’s chosen scheme, Read Write Inc.
Lessons build children’s knowledge of grapheme-phoneme correspondences alongside skills in blending and segmenting.
Daily phonics sessions continue until children are secure with their knowledge of the alphabetic code and able to apply this to both decoding for reading and encoding for spelling. In Year 2, once children are secure with phonics, these sessions move to focusing on spelling and the learning of and practising skills of inference and retrieval.
A typical RWInc lesson looks like:
Flashcard previous sounds – Children get to practice and embed their prior learning.
Introduction of a new sound – Children are taught to say and recognise the new sound.
Practice decoding words – Children can practice decoding words with the newly taught sound.
Red and green words – Children are supported to build up their sight recognition of previously taught words.
Partner reading – Children are given an opportunity to read aloud to a partner and practice their reading decoding and reading skills.
Answering questions – Children are then encouraged to answer simple questions about the story they have read and are introduced to retrieval and inference-based skills.
Fresh Start Phonics
Fresh start phonics is a follow-on Read Write Inc phonics program aimed at supporting older children in key stage 2 with their phonic understanding to help them read age related texts fluently. It is aimed at children who may have passed the phonics screen but struggle with fluency, children who are new to country and children who have not yet passed the phonics screen test in year 1.
RWInc 1-1 tutoring
We run a 1-1 phonics tutoring intervention for children in year 1 and 2 who need extra support to catch up and keep up with the phonics scheme, ensuring all children have the best opportunity to achieve age related expectations in reading at key stage 1 and pass their phonics screen test in year 1. The tutoring sessions are run by a trained RWInc practitioner and support children with sound recognition, segmenting and blending.
Accelerated Reader
This is an educational program designed to monitor children’s understanding and comprehension of the texts and books that they read. At OLST all key stage 2 students access this program, with year 2 students accessing it in the summer term as part of their transition into key stage 2. At the start of the children will complete a star assessment which will benchmark their reading skills, and this generates children’s own personal targets reading skills target to improve on. Students can choose books within their ZPD range in the library. Once they have read a book, they then complete a quiz which tests their understanding and knowledge of the text before they move onto the next. Star assessments are taken termly to monitor pupils progress and teachers use star assessments to inform their own planning and teaching of specific reading skills.
English Lessons – Writing
Our English curriculum follows the statutory aims of the National curriculum. All our English lessons are based around a high-quality text in which students will study and use as inspiration for their writing outcome. These high-quality texts link closely with student’s topic to ensure strong cross-curricular links which will broaden and deepen children’s knowledge and understanding and make links across subjects.
Our English curriculum follows a planning sequence which allow pupils to progress through the texts they study and build upon prior knowledge. A typical English lesson may focus on the following, depending on where they are within the sequence:
Familiarisation – Children will have time to study, analyse and read the chosen class text. These focus on the exploring the vocabulary of the text as well as reading skills such as retrieval, inference and prediction.
Core Skills – These lessons will focus on building upon and using specific grammar and punctuation relevant to the text and spelling.
Capturing ideas – Lesson will focus on oral literacy skills such as oral storytelling and oral rehearsal. Role play and drama-based lessons would be used here.
Writing Process – Planning, draft/ writing, editing and evaluation, reading work aloud, publishing work.
It is very important that our students are given clear purposes for their writing and that we give them a chance to publish their work so they can see themselves as writers. The writing process gives children an understanding of how editing and reading aloud work aids them in improving their writing further. Children are encouraged to use purple pen to self-edit and proofread their own writing during this writing process as well as receive targeted and individual feedback from the class teacher to help them progress in their writing across the year.
Assessment
Phonics:
Reading
Writing
Curriculum Impact:
There is a clearly structured learning approach in both early reading, reading and writing throughout the school to ensure that children make progress. Children have opportunities to practise both their reading and writing skills every single day. The close cross-curricular ties ensure children’s learning of both these skills are purposeful and meaningful to them to help embed learning and commit these skills to long term memory. Children have opportunities to orally re-tell, rehearse their thoughts and ideas before writing, ensuring children develop good oral literacy as well as written.
Monitoring, Evaluation and Review
Our Lady and St Teresa’s implement a systematic approach to Monitoring, Evaluation and Review in English which comprises of the following:
English Core Texts - Non-FictionEnglish Poetry SpineEnglish Coverage MapGrammar Routeway