English

Why is English important? - Our Curriculum Intent

At Paddocks Primary school, we believe that literacy and communication are key life skills. Through the English curriculum, we will help children develop the skills and knowledge that will enable them to communicate effectively and creatively through spoken and written language and equip them with the skills to become lifelong learners. We want children to enjoy and appreciate literature and its rich variety.   If you would like a deeper exploration of our intent, implementation and impact of all of the areas of English, please click on the links below.

/docs/english/Guide_to_Reading_at_Paddocks_Primary_School__002_.pdf

/docs/english/Guide_to_Phonics_at_Paddocks_Primary_School__002_.pdf

/docs/english/Guide_to_Writing_at_Paddocks_Primary_School__002_.pdf

/docs/english/Guide_to_Grammar_at_Paddocks_Primary_School__002_.pdf

/docs/english/Guide_to_Spelling_at_Paddocks_Primary_School__002_.pdf

Our Vision

Literacy is at the heart of all children’s learning. Literacy enables children both to communicate with others effectively for a variety of purposes and to examine their own and others’ experiences, feelings and ideas, giving these order and meaning. Because literacy is central to children’s intellectual, emotional and social development it has an essential role across the curriculum and helps pupils’ learning to be coherent and progressive.  

What does English look like at Paddocks? - Our Curriculum Implementation

Reading

At Paddocks we are committed to developing a love of reading and constantly promote reading for pleasure. All children are explicitly taught reading comprehension skills. We use the ‘Read with DERIC’ acronym to teach children the key skills involved to be a successful reader – decoding, explanation, retrieval, interpretation and understanding an author’s choices. This is done using a variety of exciting texts and supported through the use of the Rising Stars Cracking Comprehension materials. Children participate in regular sessions where teachers encourage whole class, paired and independent analysis of the text. Pupils are taught to look for evidence when answering questions and encouraged to discuss their opinions of books they have read. Children have access to class libraries, the whole school library and home reading books. Our class libraries have a range of topic specific books that are changed each half term.  In Early Years and Key Stage 1, children also have access to a wide range of phonetically decodable books like Rhino Readers and in Key Stage 2 each classroom is well stocked with a variety of free reader texts. Since 2018, we have also used ‘Accelerated Reader’ to develop reading skills which uses a combination of quality children’s literature and ICT to provide children with even more opportunities to develop their reading skills both in school and at home.

Writing

Literacy lessons at Paddocks are taught in a cross-curricular fashion and linked to the exciting topics that children are studying at the time. Teachers use a structured writing cycle to cover the features of each writing genre which is further supported by the Grammarsaurus guides to non-fiction writing.

At the beginning of each writing cycle the class will look at existing examples of the chosen genre. They have the opportunity to pick out the ‘Genre Features’ needed to ensure they are writing in that genre style and any age-appropriate grammar features they can find too. Children are asked to always consider the purpose, audience and type (PAT) for each genre. The next phase in the cycle is ‘Gathering Content’ which is the chance to practise genre-specific grammar and gather the required information needed to create their final pieces of writing. The children then are asked to ‘Plan’ their piece of writing before the ‘Write’ part of the cycle. Once children have written their piece of work, they are expected to ‘Revise and Edit’ their work. We use the mnemonic ‘ARMS’ and ‘CUPS’ in this phase; revising their work is focusing on how their writing sounds and whether they need to add, remove, move or substitute any words and sentences in their work. Editing their work is focusing on what their writing looks like and asks them to check their capitals, usage (subject and verb agreement), punctuation and spelling. The final phase in the writing cycle is to ‘Publish’ their work in best for display.

Teachers use a range of resources, ICT and texts to inspire children during literacy lessons and teach the specific features of a range of fiction, non-fiction and poetry genres throughout the school.

Phonics and Spelling

Phonics is taught using the systematic synthetic phonics provider, Twinkl Phonics in Early Years and Key Stage 1. Synthetic phonics is a method of teaching reading and writing in which words are broken up into their smallest units of sound or ‘phonemes’. Children learn to associate a written letter or group of letters, known as ‘graphemes’, with each phoneme. Sounds are then joined or ‘blended’ together into words for reading or, conversely, whole words are broken down or ‘segmented’ into their sounds for writing. Teachers use a variety of strategies including games, paired work, whole class instruction, one to one and small group support and independent work to provide children with lots of opportunities to practise phonics skills throughout the day. In addition to this work, the No Nonsense Spelling programme is used in Key Stage 2 to develop children’s spelling skills. Key words relating to topics being taught are displayed in classrooms and this spelling work is applied to writing during literacy lessons.  Some elements of Twinkl Phonics Codebreakers are also used to support children's learning of early reading skills.

What do our pupils think? - Our Curriculum Impact

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Progression