Intention of our English Curriculum

As with all subjects taught at All Saints', our school vision and school values are at the heart of our English curriculum.

We aim to continually inspire our children to learn and develop a life-long love for the English language, for reading, writing and communicating.  We want to expose the children to a language rich environment; to give the children an abundance of words at their disposal so they can be explicit when sharing their thoughts, feelings, worries, ideas and opinions, thereby boosting every child's power of communication. 

It is our intention to broaden our pupils horizons through a range of high-quality and engaging texts and media that support and promote a range of social, moral, spiritual and cultural experiences.

We aim to transport the children to new and exciting worlds where they can be inspired to become authors themselves who in turn will engage and inspire others. 

Implementation of our English Curriculum

English is taught daily with a further 30 minute personalised guided reading session every day for every class.  This allows us to further develop our ethos as a reading school, where children are exposed to the joy of reading in various forms - from individual reading, shared reading, group reading and whole class guided reading sessions.   We use the Pathways to read mastery approach personalised to meet the needs of all our learners. 

We follow a Mastery approach to English through the programme ‘Pathways to Write.’ Units of work are delivered using high quality texts and children in all year groups are given varied opportunities for writing. Skills are built up through repetition within the units, and children apply these skills in the writing activities provided.  Many opportunities for widening children’s vocabulary are given through the Pathways to Write approach and this builds on the extensive work we do in school to provide our children with a rich and varied vocabulary.  

You will find the end of year expectations for writing, reading and spoken language for each of our year groups in the attached documents. For further detail on the skills that your children are learning on a termly basis, please contact your class teacher.

Our implementation within each year group builds on prior learning.  There is a wide but balanced range of fiction, non-fiction and visual literacy running through each class.  We buy in to Lancashire Library Services and run the Fantastic Book Awards in the Year 6 classroom.  We have loan boxes throughout the year that link to various wider curriculum subjects and / or provide a text for each child for our English unit.  

Children have regular visits from authors who expose them further to a wide range of texts and the possibilities and opportunities writing can give. 

Impact of our English Curriculum

English at All Saints' is key to engagement in the rest of the curriculum, to communication and to children's enjoyment of education. The successful approach to teaching and learning of English at All Saints’ results in a fun, engaging, high-quality English education.  Children become life-long learners with a love for the written word, they become articulate and confident orators and communicators and writers with a wide choice of vocabulary and skills.  Children are engaged with reading, writing, speaking and listening and look forward to reading new texts and discovering more new worlds.

Reading:

We aim to instil a love of reading within all our children. From EYFS through to Year 6.

Children in Early Years and Year One take home Read Write Inc texts specifically linked to the phonics sounds and texts they have been covering in class. Year 2 children, once they are confident readers and can access texts at a Year 2 standard, will progress onto reading a wider range of reading materials at home. All children in Early Years and KS1 take a reading for pleasure book home each week to develop a 'love of reading' from an early age. Vocabulary and questioning is specifically focused and targeted through these texts. 

We buy into the Lancashire Library Services which provides every class with a rich variety of up-to-date texts for class libraries.  We also have access to specific topic boxes that can support the wider curriculum, whole class guided reading, group-specific texts and reading for pleasure.  We take part in the annual Fantastic Book Awards competition.

Once children are fluent and confident readers, we provide a wide range of longer novels, and more challenging texts, by a range of authors, for children to make 'free' choices from. 

We have class libraries and a library within school which we encourage our children and their families to make use of. Our Year 5 and 6 children will act as librarians, guiding children in choices they make.