English

At Hedon Primary School we know and understand our children. We have listened to our children’s voices, and we have created a curriculum that encourages them to become enthusiastic and engaged with English by providing them with a broad and balanced range of creative and innovative experiences.

We have worked hard to provide our children with rich and varied learning opportunities that help them to become confident and enthusiastic learners. We want our children to have a positive attitude towards communication and to be able to independently express their emotions and their ideas.

Through our English Curriculum, we strive to teach the children how important their reading, writing, speaking and listening skills will be in the real world. By giving this context to their learning, the children understand the value of English to them now, and in their futures.

Implementation:

At Hedon Primary School we want all of our pupils to be capable readers, writers, spellers and speakers, who can transfer their English skills to other curriculum subjects and who are prepared for the next steps in their education.

Our English lessons develop pupils’ spoken language, reading, writing, grammar and vocabulary. English is often taught in a cross-curricular way, linking up with other areas of the curriculum with rich and high-quality texts. We teach our pupils to speak clearly, to convey their ideas fluently and confidently and to ask questions; the use of Talk for Writing in EYFS and the use of high-quality texts across the school shows this.

We know the value of excellent vocabulary and this is developed and practiced across our curriculum constantly. We use writing across the whole curriculum to encourage pupils to express their ideas, discuss their ideas and to develop more sophisticated vocabulary. Our pupils are encouraged to read for pleasure and to read widely through our reading scheme and school library.

We use Little Wandle; Letter and Sounds for our phonics programme. Phonic awareness helps the development of reading by segmenting and blending sounds and the children will be heard reading regularly, both individually and in groups.

Our whole class reading sessions cover a wide variety of both fiction and non-fiction books and help to advance the children’s comprehension skills. Parents are given reading guidance and clear expectations about reading at home. We develop writing skills so that our children have the stamina and ability to write at the age expected standard.

To support children in moving towards independent writing we provide a wide range of activities including the use of film and imagery, music, ICT, modelled, shared and guided writing, peer assessment and discussion. We provide varied and exciting opportunities for writing for purpose and we encourage pupils to see themselves as authors and poets.

We promote the importance of written work by providing a writing purpose and opportunities for children’s writing to be read aloud and listened to by their peers. Handwriting sessions are promoted regularly across the school and this also promotes spelling.

We have developed a range of extra activities which are used to promote English within the school including whole school Literacy weeks, various competitions: in school and to wider audiences, World Book Day, weekly class writers and readers, VIP readers and a Reading initiative to collect Hedon reading bands.

Further information