English Overview

Intent Statement:

English is a core subject in the National Curriculum: it is a prerequisite for educational progress across the entire primary curriculum. At Oaklands, we use the Literacy Tree to peruse our aim is to equip our pupils with the necessary skills, knowledge and understanding to become well-rounded, lifelong linguists with a real enthusiasm for reading and writing. We have developed our English curriculum with a focus on creating meaningful links with other subjects such as through history, geography and PSHE.

Our aim is to expose pupils to a wide range of high-quality texts and developing pupils’ vocabulary, grammar and punctuation skills in context. English lessons at Oaklands act as building blocks leading up to final pieces of writing in which pupils demonstrate the wide range of skills they have learnt, promoting their ‘Cultural Capital’ as lifelong readers and writers.

Our lessons take pupils through a learning journey which equips them with the knowledge they require to become skilled readers and writers, by covering a range of skills: speaking and listening through drama and role play; analysis of high-quality texts; developing grammar and punctuation in context; and reading VIPERS challenges. The work in pupils’ books illustrates a build-up of skills through word and sentence-level work, paragraph-level application, final writing pieces, editing/up-levelling and publishing.

We aim for our pupils to have the necessary stamina and understanding to write at or above the expected standard. By the time pupils leave Year 6, they will each see themselves as authors with the knowledge and skills of choosing language, structure and form to achieve a range of writing purposes.

Implementation:

At Oaklands, we adapt the Literacy Tree based on the needs of our children to ensure a wide range of text types are taught throughout each year of a child’s education at our school. Each term pupils are taught reading and writing through a variety of fiction, non-fiction and poetry units, which ensures a depth and breadth of understanding as our pupils are able to learn, explore and apply key skills from the National Curriculum in a range of contexts and for different purposes. Furthermore, extended writing takes place each half term, which provides an opportunity for pupils to apply their learning to a range of writing purposes, cross-curricular contexts.

At Oaklands, we endeavour to relate children’s learning to real-life experiences as often as possible. As a result, links are often made to practical activities, ‘Hooks’ into the text, school trips and pupils’ own experiences. Our English curriculum is firmly grounded in a quality first book-led approach, with units linked to carefully selected, quality texts, which enables pupils to learn in context and encourages their passion for reading. In KS1, children are taught to read and decode through the implementation of Monster Phonics. As the children progress into KS2, Key reading skills are taught within English sessions through Reading Skills VIPERS: Vocabulary, Inference, Prediction, Explain, Retrieve, Sequence and Summarise.

Impact:

At Oaklands, the children develop their knowledge and skills in Reading and Writing as they progress through Key Stage Two. The children build on their previous learning of English in EYFS and Key Stage One and apply their new understanding to reading and writing in a variety of new contexts and purposes. By the time the children leave Year 6, they will each have their own voice as a writer, and as a reader.

The children experience reading in all aspects of their regular classroom activities and are experienced to in a range of high-quality text types and genres to meet the needs of the curriculum. The children develop their knowledge and understanding of these areas within their reading: an understanding of new words in contexts; they can infer character emotions through language and illustration; predict based on events which have already taken place; ‘scan and skim’ to retrieve key information from a text and summarise and sequence key events.

The children at Oaklands see themselves grow as mature writers who can apply their understanding of the components of the English language to write for a variety of different purposes and audiences by:

• Writing to entertain
• Writing to persuade
• Writing to discuss
• Writing to inform

As they progress through Key Stage Two, their understanding of how language can be used selectively and purposefully grows in a challenge-led environment for all pupils.