English

English is at the heart of everything we do.

It opens up endless worlds and helps us share and achieve our dreams. English knits everything we do together and gives us our voice. In our learning across the curriculum, we gain the confidence and skills to use our voice effectively: to share our ideas, to stand up for what is right and to achieve our goals and ambitions.

Reading

Learning to read is one of the most important things that we can do.

Reading unlocks new avenues of knowledge, fires our imaginations, enriches our vocabulary and helps us to understand and value the diversity of the world we live in.

There are two skills we need in learning to read: word reading and comprehension.

Skilled word reading involves swiftly recognising the printed words that we know, whilst rapidly working out how to say those words that are less familiar. To do this, we need to understand that the letters on the page are linked to sounds in spoken words. This is why phonics is so important in our early teaching of reading

Good comprehension brings together our knowledge of language and our knowledge of the world. Our teachers use their skills to help us develop comprehension skills through our shared reading, our reading lessons and through discussions of stories, poems and non-fiction.

We teach phonics and early reading through Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised, which is a systematic and synthetic phonics programme. You can find out more about our approach to phonics and early reading here.

In key stage two, we teach reading every day. Our learning is rooted in high quality texts and shares the thematic approach of our learning in English. This supports children to become critical readers and encourages them to make comparisons and connections between the books that we explore each half term.

We think it is important to read widely across fiction and non-fiction. Collins Big Cat Phonics for Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised is our reading scheme in foundation and year one, and Collins’ Big Cat is our core scheme as we explore and extend our reading preferences beyond phonics in year two and throughout key stage two.

Our reading scheme helps us to grow as fluent readers. Everyone has a reading book selected from the reading scheme. Our teachers choose the colour band of the book carefully to match the instructional level of reading. This is the level where we have the ‘right’ amount of challenge for developing and practising new reading strategies.

In tandem with our reading scheme, we choose our own books to read and share from our class and school libraries, from home and beyond. This gives us the chance to explore different story-worlds, topics and authors and to find out what kind of books we really love.

We know that reading for enjoyment is important. We know that there is a strong link between reading for pleasure, how well we do at school and our emotional well-being. The adults in our school read to us daily and this helps to spark our different interests and fuel our love of reading.

By the time we leave St Adrian’s, teachers make sure that we can read fluently and with confidence in any subject.

The teaching sequence for writing

Our teaching in English is rooted in our shared enjoyment of high quality texts.

Across each half-term, our English lessons are based on a wide range of significant and high quality children’s literature. The books we learn from are are chosen to engage, challenge and support us to become confident and informed writers.

We are taught new skills at the start of each year that reflect the expectations of the national curriculum. The cyclical approach of the teaching sequence for writing enables us to practise, secure and master these skills across the year and to build upon the foundational learning of previous year groups.

Children’s progress through the curriculum is summarised in the following documents.

Year 1 – Progress through the curriculum
Year 2 – Progress through the curriculum
Year 3 – Progress through the curriculum
Year 4 – Progress through the curriculum
Year 5 – Progress through the curriculum
Year 6 – Progress through the curriculum

Through shared reading, we are immersed in the world of the author. Through our talk and through shared writing, we learn to imitate the authors we read and to innovate with the ideas we encounter. As we grow in confidence, we use our ever-expanding writer’s tool-kit to invent, create, edit and author our own texts.

Our Strands Tracker tracks the development of our writer’s tool-kit across the key stages.

Intent

During this academic year, from September 2023 through to July 2024, we are reviewing our long-term plan for English to make stronger links with our learning in other areas of the curriculum. We will also be sharing some brilliant books as a whole school. The first of these is Oliver Jeffer’s ‘Here We Are.’

As we make these changes, the texts that we root our learning in may not correspond with those linked below.

Year 1

Click on each year group’s bookshelf to view our curriculum intent for each year group.

Year 2

Year 3

Year 4

Year 5

Year 6

Spelling

It is important to be able to spell quickly and accurately.

We learn to spell by knowing the link between letters and sounds and by understanding how words and spellings are structured.

We start teaching phonics in Nursery/Reception and follow the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised progression, which ensures children build on their growing knowledge of the alphabetic code, mastering phonics to read and spell as they move through school. You can learn more about our approach to phonics teaching here.

Following phase 5, we use ‘No Nonsense Spelling’ which has been written to meet the spelling requirements of the national curriculum for year two through to year six.

Our spelling pathway details the learning for each year group.

Handwriting

Neat and fluent handwriting is an important part of sharing our ideas.

When we first learn to write, we learn to print our letters. Our learning in phonics helps us to learn the correct letter formation for each grapheme and make the link between the mnemonic of our phonics programme and the letter.

Once we have learnt to form each letter correctly, we begin to learn how to join digraphs. This is usually in Year 1.

In Year 2, we begin to learn to join all of our writing. We learn to join our letters using a script developed by Debbie Hepplewhite. This is a style with two main joins: a diagonal join, which starts on the line, and a washing-line (or smile) join.

By the time we reach the end of key stage two, we can write confidently and legibly in joined handwriting when writing at speed

You can find more about our handwriting style here.

Our Grammar Glossary details the grammatical concepts taught in each year group. You will see that new learning for each year is identified and sits alongside learning from previous classes.

Year 1 Grammar Glossary
Year 2 Grammar Glossary
Year 3 Grammar Glossary
Year 4 Grammar Glossary
Year 5 Grammar Glossary
Year 6 Grammar Glossary

Further Useful documents

The national curriculum in England: English programmes of study