English

English Curriculum

At The Gates Primary School, English is at the heart of everything we do and skills in reading and writing are taught and embedded across the whole curriculum. Teachers promote a love of the English language through daily engaging lessons, reading for pleasure opportunities, enrichment and a range of appropriate intervention groups to enable all children to reach their full potential.

Reading

One of the school’s priorities is to continually strive to sustain and improve standards in reading, as well as offering children different opportunities to read for enjoyment and cross curricular purposes.  Through parental support, standards in reading have improved and we look forward to building on this further this year in the following ways:

• Reading challenge: Children should read 5 times a week and record in their home reading records each time they do so. Every Friday, reading records are monitored by the class teacher and the percentage of children who have achieved ‘green’ (by reading 5 times) is compared across the school. The class with the highest percentage receives the reading award for that week. Also, children who are ‘green’ are entered into a draw with the chance to win a book which they get to keep. We appreciate parental support of reading throughout the week as this regular practise helps to support the children to develop their fluency and comprehension skills.  
• The 100 Book Challenge is an initiative to provide a reading spine for each Key Stage (EYFS, KS1, LKS2 and UKS2) and to embed a love of books and reading for pleasure. Books have been carefully chosen to enhance vocabulary, provide a range of exposure to different genres and get children and families immersed in quality books. The children collect certificates at 4 different milestones within the challenge. We look forward to finding out which children will be able to complete this challenge this year!

Reading at home Top tips on how to help develop your child’s reading comprehension at home:

• Ask- what is happening in the story?
• Discuss the meaning of words
• Make predictions – ask them what they think will happen next and why
• Discuss feelings – how are the characters feeling at this point? How do you, the reader, feel?
• Discuss where the story is set. Have you read other books with a similar setting?
• Summarise the key events of the story
• Re-read some sentences and focus on the expression and tone of voice that is required- pointing out punctuation as a guide
• Look at the subheadings in non-fiction texts – where might we find certain information?

Phonics

At The Gates, we believe that the teaching of phonics is the stepping stone to develop children’s early reading skills.

We follow the Government validated Essential Letters and Sounds SSP program.

• In Nursery, the children learn about the early speaking and listening skills such as hearing and identifying the initial sounds, discriminating between environmental sounds and oral blending and segmenting which lay the foundations for Phase 2 phonics teaching.
• From Reception class, our children follow the Essential Letters and Sounds validated SSP programme through into Key Stage 1.
• Phonics interventions are in place to enable children to keep up
• Where appropriate, phonics interventions are continued in Key Stage Two for any children who require extra support.

Writing

At the Gates, Writing is taught through an exciting and engaging curriculum, with cross-curricular links, enrichment opportunities and author inspiration!

• A variety of genres are taught through the use of carefully selected texts which appeal to children with different interests.
• The vocabulary is displayed on working walls in the classrooms for the children to use throughout the year.
• High quality cross curricular writing is encouraged in the foundation subjects so that writing is purposeful.
• Children develop their knowledge and skills throughout the unit with the aid of extended piece of positive feedback from the teacher and success criteria. They then complete an extended piece writing at the end of the unit and this work is assessed carefully.
• Children are also provided with speaking and listening opportunities throughout a writing unit and perform their final piece.
• Marking provides the children with a next step to help them develop their writing further.
• Children are inspired through author visits in person or via a video link.