English at Wantage CE Primary School

‘After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.’

Phillip Pullman

By the end of Year 6 at Wantage CE School, we aspire to develop pupils who:

• are effective, competent communicators and good listeners;
• can express opinions, articulate feelings and formulate responses to a range of texts both fiction and non-fiction using appropriate technical vocabulary;
• have fostered an interest in words and their meanings, and to develop a growing vocabulary in both spoken and written form;
• enjoy and engage with and understand a range of text types and genres;
• can write in a variety of styles and forms showing awareness of audience and purpose;
• have developed powers of imagination, inventiveness and critical awareness in all areas of literacy;
• can use grammar and punctuation accurately;
• understand spelling conventions;
• produce effective, well-presented written work.

To fulfil the above, we teach English in the following strands, with different aspects being taught at different stages.

Speaking and Listening

We value the need to be able to ‘talk it’ before one can ‘write it’. To support this, we have adopted the Talk for Writing approach for teaching English. In accordance to this method, children have opportunities to engage in imitation activities, so that they can internalise speaking patterns (sentence construction within the text) and use those structures to then go on and write independently. We believe that this approach not only improves speaking and listening, but also significantly broadens pupils’ spoken and ultimately written vocabulary. In addition, we provide opportunities for children to develop speaking and listening in a broader sense, including: school council elections, mini-speaks competitions, performing poetry and year group productions, which are performed to parents.

Early Reading Skills

Later Reading Skills

As readers become more fluent, we move towards embedding and deepening reading skills through a whole class text, in guided reading sessions. This is where pupils read whole books, looking in-depth at: characters, setting, inference, deduction and prediction. This approach nurtures a broadening of vocabulary and understanding the writers’ craft in much more detail. In turn, this feeds into pupil writing skills, reflecting on how authors write.

Accelerated Reader

To foster a love of reading, we have adopted the Accelerated Reader Programme for Years 3-6. This provides pupils with a ZPD (zone of proximal development) score, which supports pupils choosing books which precisely match their reading capability, whilst provided the right degree of challenge. Our books in KS2 are colour banded using the AR system. With this programme, pupils quiz on the books they have read, leading to earning words on their wall. We have reward systems to aid pupil motivation, including monthly ‘lucky dip’ prizes for those children who quiz accurately and ‘Word Millionaire’ badges, for those pupils who earn one million words on their wall.

Writing

We recognise that writing draws on a wide range of skills, including: spelling, handwriting, composition and impact. We believe that ‘good readers become good writers’. To this aim, we acknowledge that there is a close link between reading a wide range of high-quality books and the impact that this can have on the ability to write well. We maximise on this through the Talk for Writing approach; enabling children to imitate the key language they need for a genre, before they try to write within that genre. Through fun activities pupils rehearse the ‘tune’ of the language they need, participate in shared writing and then go onto write in the same style. This builds on 3 key stages: Imitation, Innovation and Invent.

Handwriting

We believe fluent handwriting is an essential skill required by all children. Cursive handwriting is taught from the start of school and is continued throughout, to Year 6. We believe that high expectations in handwriting not only raises standards in presentation, but also develops confidence, enabling the pupil to focus on the composition of what they are writing as opposed to the transcription skill.

This is the order in which letter formation is taught:

Spelling and Grammar

Spelling is a crucial part of the writing process. We teach spelling and grammar discreetly, and as part of English lessons. We use the RWINc spelling programme to support the knowledge and understanding of spelling rule and the etymology of words.