English

English

At St Barnabas we are passionate about reading and writing. We aim to develop a love of reading for pleasure and children are given plenty of opportunities to read and write across the curriculum. 

Miss Flynn is our English subject leader and she is passionate about our children developing a love of reading and writing. Last year she overhauled our school library and purchased lots of new and exciting books for our children to choose from based on their recommendations. 

Mrs Lewis, the Vice Principal and English teacher at our local high school, is our English link governor.

For all the latest English curriculum news, please click here.

Previous Next

English Documents

Reading Intent: 

Our overarching aim at St Barnabas is for our pupils to achieve great things and live life in all its fullness. Offering a well-rounded and balanced curriculum is one way we work towards achieving this and English provides the perfect platform for children to achieve great things and explore what living a full life might look like for them and the people around them. At St Barnabas, we believe that the teaching of reading is integral to a child’s understanding and appreciation of the world around them; a platform that allows our pupils to see beyond what they know, share in cultural experiences and develop the vocabulary they need to express themselves. Our reading curriculum strives to foster a lifelong love of reading.  We believe that all pupils should have the opportunity to be fluent, confident readers who are able to successfully enjoy, comprehend and understand a wide range of texts and vocabulary. We want pupils to develop a love of reading, a good knowledge of a range of authors, and be able to understand more about the world in which they live through the knowledge they gain from texts.  

Reading Implementation:

Reading is an important part of our curriculum and is an integral part of all of our lessons. We use reading as a fundamental part of all curriculum planning and development to support and enhance our pupils’ reading ability across the wider curriculum and immerse them in a language rich environment. 

To achieve this at St Barnabas:

-We teach synthetic phonics in EYFS and  Key Stage 1. The acquisition of reading is incorporated in the Bug Club Phonics Programme. Through this programme, the pupils are taught the essential skills needed for reading. Phonics is taught daily to all pupils  in Foundation Stage, and Year 1 and its delivery is underpinned by continual assessment, allowing teachers to identify gaps in learning and use this to inform subsequent planning and intervention. The children have reading books which they are encouraged to read regularly at home which match their current phonics level. This enables class teachers to deliver a tailored learning experience for our pupils at St Barnabas. 

-We follow a carousel guided reading approach from Years 2-6. The primary purpose of the lessons is modelling skills, with assessment secondary.  The teacher selects a high-quality text that will challenge all pupils within the group. These lessons are built around the teacher reading high-quality and challenging texts, which are dissected by the group through high-level questioning and discussion.  Pupils work on activities that help them to understand new vocabulary and develop their comprehension of the text, ensuring that our pupils are able to make justified responses using evidence from the text.  They are also taught to develop their ability to understand the author’s intent, connections and links to their own experiences. 

-We maximise opportunities for pupils to read through our foundation subjects. These lessons support the teaching of reading whilst increasing pupils’ knowledge, understanding and technical vocabulary associated with the subject being taught. 

-We have a timetabled daily storytime session across school. This is an opportunity for all pupils to hear the teacher reading to the class, modelling fluency and intonation whilst helping  pupils to get to know and love all sorts of stories, poetry and information books and extend their vocabulary, comprehension, as well supporting their writing. 

-In both KS1 and KS2, our taught English units begin with a reading phase. Pupils explore a wide range of fiction, non-fiction and poetry within this phase as we recognise that reading development is closely linked to that of writing, for it is when given opportunities to reflect upon and discuss the texts they encounter, that pupils truly understand the writing process and are able 

to write in a variety of styles and forms appropriate for the intended audience

-We prioritise the assessment of reading. Pupils are tested each half term to assess their reading level, ensuring that pupils are reading the most appropriate books.  All pupils are listened to a minimum of once a week. In both key stages, pupils identified as needing additional support with their reading will be listened to a minimum of three times a week. This is to support them in meeting the expected standard in reading.

-We know that reading for pleasure is beneficial not only for reading outcomes, but for wider learning enjoyment and mental wellbeing. Therefore, we work hard to foster a love of independent reading and build communities of engaged readers. To support this, our library is regularly updated with newly published books, and those that have been requested by our pupils. 

-We understand the significance of parents and carers in supporting their pupils to develop both word reading and comprehension skills so we endeavour to build a home-school partnership which enables parents and carers to have the confidence to support their pupils with reading at home. 

Reading Impact:

By the time pupils leave St Barnabas, we aspire that all pupils are fluent, confident and enthusiastic readers, who can recommend books to their peers, access a range of texts for pleasure and enjoyments, as well as use their reading skills to unlock learning in all areas of the curriculum. They have a thirst for knowledge, can read a wide range of genres and confidently participate in discussions about what they have read. They can also read books to enhance their knowledge and understanding of all subjects on the curriculum, and communicate their research to a wider audience.

Writing Intent

The intention of our writing curriculum offered at St Barnabas is to enable all children regardless of their starting point to be successful in their writing journey. This is done through developing opportunities for children to be courageous writers that are able to write efficiently and creatively. We aim to create efficient spellers, who can articulate their views and ideas through the media of the written word. We endeavour to create proficient writers who are immersed in their writing opportunities after being exposed to a rich and varied stimuli for writing. Our mission is to enable all children in our school to be able to communicate their ideas, thoughts and feelings through their own written words. 

Writing Implementation

Spelling

At St Barnabas, we have recently introduced the read write inc. spelling scheme. This is to address a major gap in skills noticed by staff through writing moderation. The use of interactive and engaging sessions will enable the children to be exposed to their spelling rules and allow them to contextually apply them in a safe environment where exposure is immersive throughout a unit. Also, misconception and exceptions to rules are taught explicitly to enable all children to accurately understand how to spell their age appropriate word spellings. 

Handwriting

We are in the process of establishing letter join and writing repeater as our chosen handwriting scheme to enable the understanding and fluency required when performing joined handwriting. It is hoped that through exposure to this scheme we will enable all children to develop fluid handwriting strategies to enable them to write at length and at speed legibly.

Writing composition

Over the course of the last year, we have been using Alan Peat’s writing strategies for sentence level understanding. We have developed a sense of sentence awareness and then have used these strategies to develop the technical aspects of grammar through child friendly and engaging names. We allow children to develop these sentence types and use a vast array of modelling to show how we can link individual sentences together across a paragraph and multiple paragraphs. Also, we can effectively show how sentence types can be used throughout a variety of writing genres by identifying them in a variety of texts through our reading stage of developing our writing units.

Coded editing/marking

Through our coded editing children experience the opportunity to edit and improve their work by identifying their errors and applying their knowledge of all the above elements of writing. Teachers use codes for errors and the children then find their own errors and edit using their purple pens thus showing an understanding of the elements taught. 

Writing Impact

The impact of our development of writing has improved outcomes for teachers and children in school.

Teachers now feel more confident in the delivery of their grammar due to the use of the Alan Peat sentence types. They have a reference point as to where they can go to find engaging writing activities that fundamentally teach the children in their class the grammar coverage for each year group. Teacher’s workload has been heavily reduced due to read write inc spelling, having all the planning and resources already available saves teachers time but also ensures outcomes for children as well. We are hopeful that the continuation of the handwriting scheme will see a development and improvement of handwriting across school. 

The children are able to articulate what type of sentence has what grammatical function. For instance: a FAT, FAP or FAM sentence are all fronted adverbials that do different things. The children are now becoming more proficient when using these sentence types and are now showing deeper understanding though editing and improving by identifying their own errors when using these sentences.

World Book Day 2023

Previous Next