Rothley Church of England Academy
English
"Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone." — Colossians 4:6
Intent
In our curriculum, the development of pupils’ spoken language, reading, writing and vocabulary are integral aspects of the teaching of every subject. English is both a subject in its own right and the medium/tool to learn and express oneself. Fluency in the English language provides access to the whole curriculum and is an essential foundation for success in all subjects. The knowledge and skills in our English curriculum are sequenced and designed to ensure continuity and progression. The English curriculum is taught to be remembered, not merely encountered. Children feel empowered through acquiring knowledge and making connections between the various parts of their learning. We achieve this through understanding the cognitive science of the working memory and the power of retrieval. We understand that for knowledge to be stored in the children’s long-term memory, we need to build upon this, retrieve this knowledge so as to form wide and deep schemas.
Spoken language
Pupils at Rothley are taught to speak clearly and convey ideas confidently using Standard English. They learn to justify ideas with their reasons and use discussions to elaborate and explain their understanding. They are confident asking questions to develop their vocabulary and build on previous knowledge. They negotiate and evaluate, building on the ideas of others and selecting the appropriate register for effective communication. Our curriculum ensures that children become competent in the art of speaking and listening, crafting and creating formal presentations, demonstrating to others and participating in debates. They are taught to design well-structured descriptions and explanations and to develop their ideas and understanding through speculating, hypothesising and exploring ideas. This enables them to clarify their thinking as well as organise their ideas for writing.
Reading
At Rothley Church of England Academy, we use reading to expand our children’s horizons, build creativity and imagination as well as to teach and build upon new knowledge and skills. We strive to ensure that every child can read fluently and with confidence by the time they leave primary education.
We recognise that reading develops children’s empathy and understanding of the world they live in; it connects them to new cultures and communities and improves their prospects, contributing to positive mental health and wellbeing. Our passion is to find a book, author, or text type that every child enjoys so that all children see themselves as ‘a reader’. Through the delivery of our reading curriculum, we hope to create a reading culture where children’s enthusiasm for reading creates lifelong readers who choose to read for pleasure.
Our reading curriculum focusses on two dimensions:
• Language Comprehension (both when listening and when reading).
There is a great focus on talk and stories to ensure the successful development and progression of vocabulary and language.
• Word Reading:
We strive to ensure children can read and write fluently.
We achieve this through our weekly reading sessions. These lessons follow a whole class approach to teaching reading, thus ensuring every child is engaged in meaningful learning. During reading sessions, pupils will be exposed to high quality fiction, non-fiction and poetry texts which provide them with the opportunities to improve their ability to infer, retrieve, predict, explain, and summarise what they have read. Alongside this, they will focus on key vocabulary and explore how to begin to define unknown words in context. During reading sessions, children communicate in pairs or groups to discuss the texts and are encouraged both to articulate their responses verbally as well as structuring written answers.
Teaching through a text
We give our pupils the opportunity to practise and develop as readers and writers by reading texts that will inspire them to write. The texts selected in our curriculum have been carefully chosen to serve different purposes. Our core texts are explored through whole class reading and are used as a tool to inspire writing. Other high-quality texts have been selected to support our core texts. For example, non-fiction texts are used to research a historical or geographical aspect of the story and books are used to inspire throughout the curriculum. Furthermore, reading across the curriculum provides an excellent opportunity for children to put into practise what they have learnt.
Reading for pleasure
We understand the importance of children reading to themselves and being read to. Therefore, each class builds in independent reading time. Children visit our school library each week and choose their own ‘reading for pleasure’ book, which allows them to follow their own interests and build their reading stamina. All pupils are encouraged to read widely across both fiction and non-fiction to develop their knowledge of themselves and the world they live in, to establish an appreciation and love of reading, and to gain knowledge across the curriculum.
Alongside this, we also ensure that all children are read to daily by their class teacher. We use this to broaden their horizons, introduce the children to a variety of fiction and non-fiction texts, both upcoming and established authors and enable them to encounter books that they might struggle to access on their own.
Listening to stories supports vocabulary development and improves knowledge. It is an opportunity for a teacher to model the skills of reading and for the children to see this as an enjoyable activity. As a school, we recognise that there are strong links between reading for pleasure and positive mental health and wellbeing. Higher levels of mental wellbeing and life satisfaction impact on academic achievement. Fiction helps to increase pupil’s empathy, social skills, and inter-personal understandings. When our children engage deeply with characters and scenarios, they gain a deeper understanding of our shared humanity and common struggles. Thus, we encourage children to read to relax and take pleasure in their free time.
Phonics
At Rothley we understand the importance of a firm foundation in phonics to enable all our children to acquire the knowledge to become confident and independent readers and writers. From the Early Years we develop a synthetic systematic approach to teaching phonics through our Little Wandle phonics programme. This well-structured and comprehensive phonics programme ensures that all children develop an in-depth knowledge of phonics to become successful readers and writers. Decodable texts are matched carefully so that children can apply their phonic knowledge confidently and with success. We aim to ensure that children apply their phonic knowledge across all areas of the curriculum in both reading and writing.
Spelling
In Year 2, Little Wandle Spelling is used to support the teaching of spellings. Through Little Wandle scheme, children develop knowledge of spellings though an efficient system which scaffolds the explicit teaching of spelling. This is a clear focus on teaching pupils the connections between words, their sound associations, etymology and patterns.
At Rothley it is our intent that children learn and use their knowledge of spelling across the curriculum. In KS2 our spelling scheme continues to follow the principles of Little Wandles phonics teaching and enables the children to understand the morphology and etymology of words to build schemas and enable children to move their learning into long-term memory. Spellings are shared with parents to enable children to continue to build their understanding and knowledge of spelling.
Writing
At Rothley, writing is an integral part of our curriculum. All children from Foundation Stage to Year 6 are provided with many opportunities to develop and apply their writing skills across the curriculum. It is our intention that pupils develop a clear understanding of the writing process to establish themselves as an author in their own right. Through our curriculum and the use of The Write Stuff, we foster pupils' interest in writing and make the purpose and context for writing clear which enables the children to write for purpose and audience. We believe that pupils who are provided a reason for writing demonstrate flair and effective writing composition, leading to high quality outcomes. Pupils are taken on a writing journey which builds their knowledge of writing, allows opportunities for the children to explore a variety of genres: planning, drafting and re-drafting their writing. As a result, pupils develop their knowledge of genre features, audience, language and effective composition. It is our intention to broaden our pupils' exposure sophisticated vocabulary to allow pupils to apply their understanding of vocabulary and grammatical features within and across the English curriculum.
We intend that pupils learn how to understand the relationships between words, word meaning, implied meaning and figurative language within writing lessons, whilst ensuring that children are supported in their spelling strategies. We intend that pupils will be taught to control their speaking and writing consciously and to use the correct tone and form when composing for their intended audience.
The English curriculum is taught by focusing on one text type at a time. Children are taught to develop an understanding of the text type through reading comprehension - exploring the key features, style and form of the text being studied. In conjunction with this, pupils are taught the grammar objectives from the National Curriculum. It is our intention that the children will develop their mastery approach to writing by using their skills and transfer these to write in other curriculum subjects.
At Rothley, Children are encouraged to take pride in their writing; working towards shared goals of authorship and ownership whereby they produce pieces of writing which they are proud of and have the audience and purpose at the forefront of their writing design.
