English

Intent

At Coppetts Wood, Our English curriculum is designed with and for our children. It is knowledge rich and concept driven; we believe that learning should be purposeful, memorable and apply English-specific skills every single day.

It is our aim for children to listen, speak, read and write confidently, fluently and with a breadth of understanding that will enable them to grow as independent and life-long learners in the wider world.

Through our teaching of English, we aim to foster in children a love of reading so that they can express themselves creatively and imaginatively as they become enthusiastic and competent writers.

Children gain an understanding of how language works by looking at its patterns, structure and origins and through a quality range of genre and culturally diverse core texts. At Coppetts Wood, we provide purposeful and authentic opportunities to develop and apply these skills across the wider curriculum.

Through memorable, real-life writing purposes that link to their learning, we believe that our pupils respond by challenging themselves to write with genuine enthusiasm, creativity and accuracy for their audience. We set high expectations and challenge the children to take pride in their work when they draft, edit and then publish their writing. We aim to meet the needs of all the children by providing quality first teaching so that learning is adapted and supported to reflect the needs of all learners. Progress is robustly monitored so that children are challenged and supported to achieve their full potential with increasing accuracy and enthusiasm for their audience.

How do we ensure a breadth of knowledge and skills?

English is a core subject in the National Curriculum. At Coppetts Wood, we use a variety of teaching and learning styles which follow the aims of the National Curriculum 2014. Our principal aim is to develop children’s knowledge, skills, and understanding. We do this through a broad and balanced curriculum in which children are at the centre of their learning. They experience a range of strategies and approaches for example, English lessons provide creative opportunities to immerse themselves in the core reading text before sharing the experience of writing with their teacher and peers to support their final writing outcomes. Phonics, spelling, grammar and handwriting lessons promote, embed and enhance their learning. Pupils are also provided with opportunities to learn about themselves, their community and the school values that they have chosen. This will enable them to make the most of these important links with the wider world.

Our writing intentions are that children:

Write for a purpose
See themselves as real writers
Take ownership of their writing
See writing as an interesting and enjoyable process
Acquire the ability to organise, plan and edit their written work

How do children make progress?

At Coppetts Wood, we follow a progression map. This provides children with opportunities to learn about different genres of writing and apply this to a variety of contexts that explore a termly concept curriculum driver. This ensures that writing is purposeful and engaging and builds on prior learning. Writing is developed throughout the school and progression is planned using the National Curriculum programmes of study and the Writing for a Purpose document, which is reflected in our long term planning. This outlines the 4 writing purposes, the text types, key features, and relevant grammar, punctuation and spelling linked to these purposes.

Teaching Reading at Coppetts Wood

Reading is at the heart of our curriculum. As children’s reading develops at different rates, teaching is tailored to each child and their ability, with a focus on instilling in our children a word-rich vocabulary that will enable them to access a variety of texts. This begins in the classroom with cross-curricular displays that provide a vocabulary-rich environment to inspire and encourage our children to understand, practise and apply new words to their everyday oracy and written language. By including a vast range of vocabulary in all lessons and the physical learning environment, we aim to embed high quality language and increase children’s retention of key vocabulary, which they can then understand and use accurately and independently. Through the tiered approach, children also learn how to group vocabulary based on their common usage and make links between words based on definition and etymology.

Children read daily in the classroom, either in shared reading pairs, one-to-one with a member of staff, or within whole class sessions. Staff teach and model reading skills to all children, before building on each child’s understanding of vocabulary, to increase their confidence and individual bank of word knowledge. We continuously encourage all children to read a range of texts both in school and at home, so that they have as many opportunities as possible to discuss the meaning of texts, build on their knowledge of language and make links between texts and vocabulary. Children are given lots of opportunities to ask questions, explore texts in depth and become used to answering a range of questions accurately and in a clear, succinct manner. They then have further opportunities to independently apply their knowledge and skills.

The Reading Road Map at Coppetts Wood

What is the Reading Road Map?

The Reading Road Map is a reading initiative that we are using in KS2.
Its main aims are to allow children to discover a wide variety of new and exciting book titles and authors, as well as creating and nurturing a love for reading.

How can it be used?

Children can start reading whichever book they choose. The main purpose of the scheme is to allow children to find new books that they might enjoy, and possibly new genres they have never tried or encountered before.
Once a child has read a book, they can get it ticked off on their checklist.
For every certain number of books read, the children will be given a certificate.
While it would be fantastic for children to read as many books as they can, the aim is to encourage them to enjoy reading and finding new books they want to read.
The books in each year group are spread across a range of reading abilities and as children become stronger readers over the course of the year, they will be able to access more and more of the books on the list. The books are colour coded to reflect challenge.

Teaching Phonics at Coppetts Wood

The approach to the teaching of phonics at Coppetts Wood School is based on the Phonographix Reading Programme. Phono-Graphix is based simply on:

The nature of the English code (Written English)
The three skills needed to access that code
How children learn

The nature of the English code is as follows:

Letters are ‘pictures’ of sounds (visual representations) known as graphemes (In the word ‘please’ for instance, there are four sounds and each is represented by a ‘sound picture’ /p/, /l/,ea/, /se/)
‘Sound pictures’ (Graphemes) can be made up of one or more letters
It contains variation (Most sounds have more than one way in which they can be represented. The sound 's', for instance, can be represented in these ways: sat city voice house fuss castle, science)
Sound pictures are sometimes reused, they overlap (The same sound picture that spells the sound 'ee' in beach spells the sound 'e' in bread and the sound 'a-e' in steak.

The Skills:

Segmenting (Segmenting is the ability to separate the sounds in spoken words)
Blending (Blending is the ability to blend sounds into words)
Phoneme Manipulation (Phoneme Manipulation is the ability to pull sounds in and out of words)

How Children Learn:

Children learn best in context and through active discovery. (sound to symbol relationship is taught in words and in real books rather than in isolation)
All new learning takes place in the context of errors

Phonographix does not…….

Teach that letters "make" sounds, rather that sounds are represented with ‘sound pictures’ (Graphemes)
Rely on rules to teach children about our written system, e.g. "When two vowels go walking the first one does the talking"