English

Intent - what do we teach?

English is crucial to the success of pupils in both their career aspirations and their quality of life. Strong communication skills are encouraged at Chantry Primary Academy and our book-based curriculum is at the heart of our curriculum.

Our texts are chosen to reflect our community and connections with people, places, cultures, heritage and times. We have chosen high quality texts which challenge and inspire all our pupils.

Our book-based curriculum has put English into context and this ensures learning is more meaningful to both teachers and pupils.

Our texts enrich the wider curriculum and the ability to read, write and articulate ideas is promoted in all areas of the curriculum, giving children the opportunity to master their literacy skills.

Implementation - how do we teach it?

Phonics

At Chantry Primary Academy we acknowledge the highly important key life skill of reading; not only throughout education, but in employment and understanding the world around us. Through a passionate approach towards teaching reading, this gives our children the building blocks towards becoming confident and enthusiastic readers.

We use a systematic synthetic phonics programme. Jolly Phonics, as it enables us to teach our children how to become fluent and experienced readers and writers. This programme supports writing through its approach to segmenting words and reading through its systematic approach to blending sounds. We encourage our children to read a wide variety of books; fiction and non-fiction; so that they are able to develop their knowledge around themselves; the world; build on their imaginations and make links between the curriculum. One of our aims is to create excitement and a love and passion for reading. We are committed to providing a vocabulary rich environment in our school, which starts with the foundation of phonics; learning to read.

At Chantry Primary Academy we use the phonics programme, Jolly Phonics. This programme is introduced to our Nursery children to build on their Phase 1 speaking and listening skills and lays the foundations for the phonics work which starts in Phase 2. In Phase 2, Reception children are introduced to recognising sounds, blending for reading and segmenting for spelling. The children have daily phonics sessions where they revise previous learning, taught new graphemes or phonemes, practise together and apply what they have learnt in fun, innovative activities. As the children work through the different phases of phonics; becoming fluent, confident and experienced readers, they are introduced to alternative ways of representing the same sound.

In Year groups 1 and 2, Jolly Phonics continues working through the phases; practising previously taught sounds; alternative spelling choices and identifying phonics interventions that may take place individually, in small groups or whole class. In year groups above Year 2, phonics interventions are put in place to support those children who need that extra support for a variety of reasons, as we believe all children are able to and can read, with the right support, teaching and programme.

Whole Class Reading

Through our book-based curriculum we can instil a love of reading high quality texts with all pupils. The teaching of reading is facilitated through whole class reading sessions. This enables all pupils to access the same high quality and challenging texts in a low threat context. Therefore, removing anxiety. Our appropriate to whole class reading removes the glass ceiling, and every child can succeed.

During whole class sessions, teachers promote quality discussions which create opportunities to develop oracy and quality questioning, based on V.I.P.E.R.S (Vocabulary, Inference, Prediction, Explanation, Retrieval, Summary.) This challenges children’s understanding of the text.

It is important that teachers reading to their class every day. This provides the opportunity to model fluency, expression, articulation – bringing text to life.

Talk for Writing

At Chantry Primary Academy, our aim is to develop in our children the ability to communicate their ideas fluently and accurately through their writing.

We teach writing following a three-staged approach of: Imitation, Innovation, and Invention; incorporating the ‘Talk for Writing’ principles. Teachers regularly model writing in daily shared writing sessions and we provide regular opportunities for children’s writing and ideas to be shared, displayed, published and celebrated.

This approach centres on children learning quality texts off by heart so that rich language and structure is embedded and built upon in every year group. Talk for Writing enables children to imitate the key language they need for a particular topic orally before they try reading and analysing it. We teach all of our English through fun activities that help them rehearse the tune of the language they need, followed by shared writing to show them how to craft their writing. This enables them to choose the writer tools they want to use in their independent writing, which in turn helps them to develop their own literacy voice.

All of our writing is taught with a clear audience and purpose in mind.

Impact - what impact is our teaching having?

The impact on our children is clear: progress, sustained learning and transferrable skills. With the principles of T4W being well established and taught thoroughly in both key stages, children are becoming more confident writers and by the time they are in upper Key Stage 2, most genres of writing are familiar to them, and the teaching can focus on creativity, sustained writing and manipulation of grammar and punctuation skills.

Whole class reading lessons are ensuring constancy in the teaching of reading comprehension skills. Once children have been taught to decode in phonics, their reading journey continues and develops clear understanding of what they read.

As all aspects of English are an integral part of the curriculum, we aim for cross curricular writing standards to improved and skills taught in the English lesson are transferred into other subjects; this shows consolidation of skills and a deeper understanding of how and when to use specific grammar, punctuation and grammar objectives.

We aim for all children, here at Chantry Primary Academy to move on to further their education and learning, that their creativity, passion for English and high aspirations travel with them and continue to grow and develop as they do.