This document sets out the Policy and Curriculum Statement for English at Churchill Church of England Primary School. Our English curriculum has been designed to promote language development which enables pupils to communicate effectively and to appreciate the richness, magic and power of the written word. It enables children to see language as a source of pleasure and enjoyment and use it to develop powers of imagination, creativity and inventiveness.

Words are the most inexhaustible source of magic

English Intent

At Churchill CEVC Primary School we use the Primary National Curriculum to underpin all aspects of the English Curriculum. Developing a love of reading, and the importance of this for our children both now and in the future, lies at the heart of our English curriculum.  We also see the power of reading as  inspiring writing. As such we have chosen a literature inspired approach for our writing curriculum that is based upon a clear progression enabling children to develop a deep understanding and acquire a rich knowledge and skills base;
 

• Learning journeys are led using a quality text as the stimulus, this may be fiction (including poetry) or non- fiction.
• In Early Years, English is planned around early reading, early writing and phonics.

Our English curriculum comprises of reading, writing and phonics; the heart of which uses our commitment to develop resilience, responsibility, confidence and self-belief.  Also included within this, are handwriting, spelling and grammar.  As reading is such a fundamental cornerstone of our curriculum and teachings at Churchill Primary School we have written a separate curriculum statement for this aspect of the English curriculum. We 

Phonics

At Churchill Primary School we are passionate about ensuring all children become confident and enthusiastic readers and writers. We believe that phonics provides the foundations of learning to make the development into fluent reading and writing easier. Through phonics, children learn to segment words to support their spelling ability and blend sounds to read words. The teaching of phonics is of high priority.

Writing

We believe in immersing our children in texts through reading and analysing the skills of an expert writer. We have chosen to use ‘The Literary Curriculum’ from the Literacy Tree to support our teaching of writing, supplementary texts not based upon this scheme are also used to complement these texts This scheme provides a coherent and progressive curriculum that is linked with the requirements of the National Curriculum and supports teachers in their delivery of exciting and engaging lessons . Through immersion in high quality texts, children become aware of the language skills of a writer and use this as a model for their writing. Using this model, children develop greater competence in the conventions of spelling, punctuation, sentence structures and text organisation.

Through our curriculum, children will develop:

• a strong command of the written and spoken word;
• the ability to write clearly, accurately and coherently, adapting their language and style in and for a range of contexts, purposes and audiences;
• the confidence and competence to produce high quality writing;
• a good understanding of grammar and punctuation and its use in effective written communication.
• the feeling of safety that when mistakes are made they can be recognised, edited and improved upon. 

Outcomes are planned with a real purpose in mind and builds on existing knowledge. The learning journey is shared with children and they understand how each step of their learning will contribute to the outcome.

Curriculum Implementation

Classroom organisation

We teach English as whole class lessons so that all children have access to the age-related skills and knowledge contained in the National Curriculum. Within lessons, teachers and teaching assistants target support for slower graspers to enable them to achieve at an age-related level, wherever possible. This may involve a greater level of scaffolding and access to additional support materials such as Writers Toolkits, Word Banks or a greater level of modelling. Rapid graspers are given opportunities to extend their writing in a variety of ways, including through showing greater control in their writing, a deeper understanding of the impact that their writing has on the reader and by using a higher level of vocabulary and grammar features.

Phonics

At Churchill Primary School we use the Department of Education approved scheme 'Unlocking Letters and Sounds, for our teaching of phonics. This allows our phonics teaching and learning to build on from their Pre School experiences and ensure progression from entering school in Reception through to and beyond entering Key Stage 2 after the end of Year 2.

As children move into Reception, they continue to build on their listening skills which has been developed through exploring Phase 1 at Pre School and are introduced to Phase 2, which marks the start of systematic phonics learning. The children have discrete, daily phonics sessions where they revise previous learning, are taught new graphemes/phonemes, practise together and apply what they have learnt. Through ‘Letters and Sounds’, the children are taught the 44 phonemes that make up all the sounds required for reading and spelling. These phonemes include those made by just one letter and those that are made by two or more letters. Children work through the different phases and as they grow in confidence and experience, they are introduced to alternative ways of representing the same sound.  As they develop through their knowledge and understanding of phonics, alternative pronunciations and spellings will be introduced in Year 1 before moving onto spelling rules in Year 2.

Phonics is delivered daily as an explicit lesson in EYFS and KS1. Phonics is taught as a whole class approach to ensure that quality first teaching is accessible to all children.

• Phase 1 – Activities are divided into seven aspects. Environmental Sounds, Instrumental Sounds, Body Sounds, Rhythm and Rhyme, Alliteration, Voice Sounds and finally Oral Blending and Segmenting.
• Phase 2 – Learning 19 letters of the alphabet and one sound for each. Blending sounds together to make words. Segmenting sounds into their separate sounds. Beginning to read simple captions.
• Phase 3 – The remaining 7 letters of the alphabet, one sound for each. Graphemes such as “ch”, “oo” and “th” representing the remaining phonemes not covered by single letters. Reading captions, sentences and questions. On completion of this phase, children will have learnt the “simple code”, i.e. one grapheme for each phoneme in the English language.
• Phase 4 – No new grapheme-phoneme correspondences are taught in this phase. Children learn to blend and segment longer words with adjacent consonants, e.g. swim, clap, jump.
• Phase 5 – Now we move on to the “complex code”. Children learn more graphemes for the phonemes which they already know, plus different ways of pronouncing the graphemes they already know.
• Phase 6 – Working on spelling, including prefixes and suffixes, doubling and dropping letters etc.

At the end of Year 1, children are assessed using a national screening test, which requires each child to read aloud forty words – twenty real and twenty ‘nonsense’ words using their phonetic knowledge. The result of this test is reported to both parents and sent to central Government for comparison between schools nationally. Any child who does not meet the required standard in this assessment repeats the test again at the end of Year 2. We use the screening outcomes and our own assessments to ensure pupils who are not secure in their phonics awareness are supported through targeted intervention as they move onto their next stage of learning.

Writing

A daily English lesson of 45-60 minutes is taught in Year 1 – Year 6 and outcomes are planned with a real purpose in mind. The learning journey is shared with children and they understand how each step of their learning will contribute to the outcome.

• As part of daily planning, previous knowledge and next steps within our progression are identified and shared with the children.
• Opportunities for proof-reading and editing written work is planned daily and children are encouraged to take an increased responsibility for proof-reading for mistakes and editing their work, with the reader in mind, as they progress through the school.
• The teaching of grammar is planned for and taught through the learning journey. Where necessary to introduce a new concept or cement understanding, additional discreet grammar sessions may be planned.

A typical 45 - 60 minute lesson is likely to include many of the following elements:

• opportunity to respond to feedback in books;
• opportunity to address any whole class misconceptions from the previous lesson;
• revisiting prior learning;
• open-ended questioning relating to texts that are being read;.
• children being encouraged to explain and justify their thinking using precise language, modelled by the adults;
• children making links in their learning;
• children engaged in literacy and book talk;
• children ‘taking risks’ and recognising making mistakes as part of the learning process;
• use of confidence lines and peer-tutoring;
• Use immersion and ‘WOW’ events to activities used (where possible) to introduce themes and reinforce learning objectives;
• guided examples with children working on whiteboards;
• comprehension and skills are taught explicitly; which use;

- prior knowledge/previewing,
- predicting,
- identifying the main idea in a text,
- summarisation,
- questioning,
- making inferences,
- visualising,
- story maps,
- retelling using oral, written and visual    

  sequences.