English

Curriculum Intent English

It is our intention at Wickham Market Primary School that every pupil, regardless of needs, achieves their full literary potential and develops a life-long love of reading, writing and literature. The English curriculum at Wickham Market Primary is made up of speaking and listening, phonics and reading, SPAG (spelling, grammar, punctuation) and writing.

Wickham Market’s curriculum has been carefully designed with the children in our community at the heart of it. The English curriculum is driven by key texts which are often linked, when appropriate to do so, to our class topics. The initial ‘driving text,’ is then supported with additional literature surrounding the same topic and introduces non – fiction, poetry and a range of other genres. We aim to provide a wide range of opportunities for our pupils to write for a purpose and for a real-life audience using excellent models of writing as a basis. This leads to pupils self-reflecting, critiquing and becoming fully immersed in their topic areas.

Through English we aim to support this philosophy by:

delivering a high quality systematic synthetic phonics programme taught consistently throughout the school.
fostering a love of reading and developing an awareness of a range of authors and genres through access to a well stocked and up to date library.
enabling children to develop and explore their skills in English with increasing maturity and awareness of audience.
encouraging children to work with others (pairs/groups) through speaking & listening activities; drama; writing for an audience and purpose, discussions and debates.
modelling to children how to improve the quality of their written work leading to them effectively edit to a high standard.
teaching children to critically analyse their work and the work produced by others.
encouraging and celebrating creativity and imagination.
teaching basic skills such as grammar terminology and comprehension leading to their application across the wider curriculum.
building on reading comprehension skills at all levels.
placing a high quality class text at the centre of our learning.
expanding children’s knowledge and understanding of a wide range of vocabulary and providing scaffolding to use these effectively in their spoken and written work.

At Wickham Market we recognise that children learn best when they are provided opportunities to revisit, revise and reflect on their skills and understanding in order to apply their learning across all areas of the curriculum. Pupils are given opportunities to develop their use, knowledge and understanding of spoken and written English within a broad and balanced curriculum, with opportunities to consolidate and reinforce taught literacy skills.

Curriculum Implementation

Wickham Market's curriculum is driven each term by key literary texts that are central to the topic; we use Jane Consadine's 'The Write Stuff' and the children use sentence stacking to help develop vocabulary and key grammatical skills.. A central key text each term enables us to support literacy across the curriculum as all topic areas focus around this. At the start of the year we carefully select classic or high quality modern texts to ensure that all children are immersed in a rich vocabulary-based curriculum. These texts are chosen and interwoven into our long term plan. We track the texts the children encounter across their year groups to ensure progression and variety. In addition to this, challenging context derived vocabulary is taught which will help children apply this language to their writing across the term.

In Phonics we have carefully chosen the Floppy Phonics scheme to embed a systematic and consistent approach to the teaching of early reading and writing. Discrete phonics lessons are taught daily with a focus on applying skills at a sound, word and text level from the earliest stages to ensure that the learning is embedded.The children are regularly assessed and additional support is provided to ensure they ‘keep up, rather than catch up’. Our reading books are orgainised into systematic and cumulative groups that link directly to the order of the sounds taught within the scheme meaning that children take home a book to practise and apply the phonics learnt in school.

Valuable Speaking and Listening opportunities at Wickham Market include:

Poetry Recitals; persuasive speeches: conscience alley; School Council Campaign Speeches; and Junior Road Safety presentations; Class Assembly performances to parents and School Productions.

Our aim is to ensure that as part of each topic children are immersed in experiences such as trips, visitors and experience days that allow them to access the curriculum and class text at a deeper level. Schema words and planning in other curriculum areas are deliberately organised to allow all children to access class texts and other subsequent learning experiences in English. We inform parents of the topic encouraging them to support their children with relevant experiences.

In KS2 Guided Reading is delivered in a 'Book Talk' approach where the children read in groups together and develop vocabulary through feeding back key elements of the text.

Impact

Children will make at least good progress in Reading, Writing and Speaking and Listening from their last point of statutory assessment of from their starting point in EYFS.
Children will use their English knowledge and skills, in all curriculum areas, to enable them to know more, remember more and understand more.
Children will have a love of Reading and make at least good progress in Reading from their last point of statutory assessment of from their starting point in EYFS.
Children will use their Reading skills as a key tool in helping them to learn, and as a result, know more, remember more and understand more.
Children will be able to produce written work in all areas of the curriculum of a similar standard which evidence good progress from their last point of statutory assessment point or their starting point in EYFS.
Children will have a knowledge of key authors and engage in conversations about their texts.
Children will have the knowledge and skills to read a range of texts and to be able to explain and justify their thoughts on their own and others written work.
Children will be creative and imaginative learners.
Children will have a good understanding of key vocabulary taught and will be able to make links with prior knowledge when faced with unfamiliar words.
Our children will be confident readers and writers, and are able to clearly discuss their learning from past and current topics, as well as explain their next steps.
Continued training and support for teachers ensuring they are the experts in the subjects that they teach.