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English

We believe in ensuring the children are delivered high quality English lessons which are supported through their main termly topic. Therefore, each Year Group has recommended Text Types each term, which enables teachers to creatively and appropriately link their English texts to the topic, consequently forming a much sharper focus and purpose for the children.

Language unites the curriculum; it is essential to all forms of communication. Children learn language through speaking and listening, reading and writing and develop their language skills through our creative curriculum. High quality texts are used to stimulate interest and provide good models of language and writing. We teach using objectives from the National Curriculum (available below), teachers creatively weave these into cross curricular topics.

Speaking and Listening
Communication is an essential skill which is developed in a variety of ways throughout the whole curriculum and school day. We teach children how to talk to each other in order to improve their learning through ‘Talk for Learning’ strategies. Children are given lots of opportunities to discuss, debate, present, chat and express their opinions in many differing situations.

Reading
We aim to foster a love of reading by providing an exciting wide range of texts. We actively encourage children to read for pleasure and enjoyment in a variety of contexts. Our library is well stocked, with up to date, quality fiction and non-fiction texts that the children can choose from to support their learning. Children have many opportunities to share texts as a whole class, group or individually. There are weekly guided reading sessions with the class teacher and classes regularly visit the school library.  Children are taught how to read using a number of strategies including phonic decoding and they are given skills to enable them to understand the meaning of texts. As children become proficient at decoding texts the focus moves towards interpretation and deeper understanding.

Writing
We encourage our children to write for a range of purposes and audiences. Where possible we provide stimulating real life contexts in which to write. Spelling, punctuation and grammar are progressively taught so that children can express their ideas, opinions and views with clarity and confidence. Children are taught to edit and self-assess their own writing in order to improve.
Our children are taught to use a cursive style of handwriting and are encouraged to join letters as soon as they are ready.  Click here to see our handwriting style and how to form the letters.