English

At Cherry Garden Primary School, we want children to learn to express themselves clearly both verbally and in writing.

 

Our intent is for children to:

•  Acquire a wide vocabulary and strong understanding of grammar and composition.
• Write clearly, accurately and coherently for a range of audiences.
• Have the stamina to write at length and apply their writing skills across the curriculum where relevant.

In EYFS, the teaching of writing focuses on the foundations of mark making and fine motor skills leading into the formation of letters. Alongside this is a strong focus on the learning of phonics using the school’s chosen scheme ‘Little Wandle: Revised Letters and Sounds’. Our Early Years practitioners use AfL and summative assessment to expertly support children, building on these skills to enable them to apply them in the formation of words and simple sentences.

 

As children move into Year 1, letter formation and handwriting continue to be a thread running through children’s learning. English teaching sequences are 2 weeks in length and are based on a carefully chosen text that enable children to be exposed to good examples of vocabulary and sentence structure, and promote ‘book talk’. Opportunities for transcription (physically writing correctly formed words onto paper while maintaining features such as finger spaces, basic punctuation, phonological awareness and the spelling of ‘tricky words’) and composition (effectively putting words together to make a sentence) and carefully planned for as part of  each teaching sequence. By making teaching sequences simple and predictable, children’s cognitive load is ‘freed up’ to focus on the fundamental elements of writing.

 

In Years 2-6,  English texts have been are carefully chosen for each year group to provide a stimulus for both fiction and non-fiction writing units. Units are 3 weeks in length and follow The Trust’s agreed 3-phase planning structure. The 3 phases include:

 

·    Immersion: children are immersed in a text and given opportunity to engage with it through speaking and listening activities and explicit grammar teaching.

 

·    Analysis: children analyse an author’s style by considering text structure, organisational features and key events, themes and characters.

 

·    Implementation: children plan, rehearse, draft and edit to write a planned unit outcome.

 

Each phase  encompasses opportunity for explicit grammar teaching and writing. Units cumulate in an agreed end of unit outcome, which allows children to apply the skills that they have learned/ revised throughout the unit.

Texts for each year group can be found in a long term plan, which identifies unit outcomes for each writing unit (fiction and non-fiction). This enables teachers to ensure that children are writing for a range of purposes: to entertain (fiction); or writing to inform, argue or explain (non-fiction).

 

The specific requirements for each year group can be viewed by clicking on the links below. These objectives represent the aspiration for each child's achievement by the end of the academic year. Within some classes there may be children working below the expectations for their year group. Where this is the case, the school will be working to help the child catch up with their peers. Where children have demonstrated a good grasp of the objectives for their year, the school will be working to deepen their understanding so that they can apply this knowledge through a range of different writing genres and across the curriculum.

 

If you would like more information about the way English is taught please speak with your child's class teacher or our English leader, Miss May.

 

English Resources

Within this site, we have created a number of pages containing detailed information (and accompanying resources) which you can use to support your child's development in English. These can be accessed either by clicking the links below or by using the 'drop down' menu at the top of every page (drop down from the 'learning tab').