English
English
~LEARNING TOGETHER: LEARNING TO BE TOGETHER ~
At Pye Bank Primary School, the curriculum supports and develops the pupils’ ambitions and aspirations and understanding of the community and the wider world in which they live. The curriculum is underpinned by enquiry based practice and is research led. Through our curriculum we aim to expose children to new experiences, including business and the world of work and research. Academic performance and the development of self (Spirituality, social, moral, physical and cultural development and mental wellbeing) are given equal importance with curriculum design. Our curriculum is designed with the key aim of supporting all children to reach their potential
Here at Pye Bank we place language at the very heart of our curriculum. We believe that all children should develop a love of reading and writing. We want them to develop the skills necessary to be able to express their thoughts and opinions, we want to inspire them and support the development of their imagination. Developing a broad vocabulary base and achieving at a high academic standard in English will enhance the life chances for our children.
At Pye Bank, we are committed to ensuring that our children become confident, enthusiastic and skilled readers, writers and communicators so that all children, other than those who are cognitively unable, leave Pye Bank working at or above age related expectations in English. We strive to ensure every child makes excellent progress and reaches their potential.
At the centre of our English Curriculum, is reading: we recognise it is a vital skill which can open up many exciting possibilities for children in their futures and empower them to follow their interests.
Our curriculum is fully aligned to the national curriculum CLICK HERE
To find out more about our Reading Curriculum visit our Reading Page
Writing at Pye Bank
Intent:
At Pye Bank CE Primary School it is our intent to provide high quality learning experiences in order to develop pupils competence in both transcription and composition. Writing is an integral part of our curriculum and we provide opportunities in English lessons and other areas of curriculum for pupils to write for a range of purposes and audiences. We recognise that writing is an essential skill and we strive to ensure that our children are confident, capable and skilled writers who thrive in further education beyond primary school.
Implementation: To see our key documents please click below
Early Writing:
The writing journey begins is EYFS where the children have the opportunity to mark make and are taught to form letters correctly. Transcriptional skills are taught and practiced through structured handwriting activities and daily writing during Phonics lessons.
Talk is a fundamental part of enabling to children to become successful writers therefore vocabulary is intentionally planned for and used to expose children to a language rich environment. Children also have the opportunity to develop their oral composition skills within focussed sessions. They use a stimulus to compose sentences and adults act as scribes modelling the transcription process to write.
Click below to find out more about Writing in the EYFS:
Writing in the Early Years Foundation Document
Transcription is the focus of Early Writing. As pupils move into KS1, they will have the opportunity to apply the ‘good habits’ they have gained from EYFS. Objectives are taken from the National Curriculum and broken down into small achievable steps during each lesson. In Year 1 and 2, children will continue to develop their fluency and automaticity in their transcription skills through regular handwriting, spelling and dictation practice. Teachers and leaders will ensure that the curriculum for phonics has been taught and that pupils are able to apply what they have learnt in their writing which enables all children to achieve well. At Pye Bank, we recognise the importance of discussion and oral rehearsal in children’s understanding of the written word which is why talk underpins the teaching of writing. Through this approach, children have the opportunity to internalise some of the new vocabulary used and the language structures that they have learnt. They can use this as a model to enable them to orally compose their own sentences whilst the focus for writing remains on transcriptional fluency. This supports our children in becoming confident writers.
KS2
As our English curriculum has been developed with reading at its heart, most of our writing outcomes in KS2 link to the high-quality, age appropriate text we have been studying in book study lessons. This not only inspires our children but it also provides them with the opportunity to apply the vocabulary, which they have been learning linked to their book, directly to their writing. Pupils moving into KS2 should have mastered the fundamentals of writing following the work that has taken place in EYFS and KS1 and where this is not the case, precisely targetted interventions will support children in keeping up. As transcription has become automatic in the early years, the focus can be on composition and the children being able to articulate and communicate their ideas coherently. Writing lessons are carefully planned and follow the National Curriculum and our ‘Pye Bank Sequence of Writing’ which ensures lessons are progressive and well sequenced. As we believe children need to see good models for their writing, we have ensured that throughout the writing sequence children have the opportunity to see and talk about good models of writing. Additionally as we want children to be reflective writers and know that writing is a process, we have provided opportunities for children to plan, write and edit their writing into our writing sequence. Children in KS2 begin the writing sequence by deconstructing an age-related exemplar text to help them to understand the layout and grammatical features of a particular genre. At this point, the purpose and audience of the piece of writing is discussed. Children are taught grammar objectives, which are carefully mapped out across school by subject leaders, as part of the writing sequence and children have the opportunity to orally rehearse what they want to write through drama based activities. Finally, children have the opportunity to plan, write and edit their own piece of writing which enables them to see that writing is process and that writers and authors have to refine their work before reaching a final piece. As we believe children need to have the time to edit and redraft their writing, this session is an integral part of the writing sequence. This writing sequence is repeated. All teachers have high expectations of what children can achieve in writing at Pye Bank and children rise to this challenge and are proud of the writing which they produce.
Spelling
As we are committed to ensuring that our children leave Year 6 with the ability to spell, in Years 1 and Foundation Stage children are taught phonically plausible strategies to spell words and they learn high frequency and common exception words. In Years 2-6, spelling is taught using the Read Write Inc Spelling programme. The scheme is taught daily at least fortnightly, for 20 minutes. It teaches children methods and rules to spell words with regular patterns and it also focuses on strategies which can be used to learn irregular spelling patterns. Any child, who has been identified as experiencing difficulty in spelling, will receive small group spelling lessons in order to help accelerate progress. Children are encouraged and taught to independently apply their learning from these lessons to their writing.
Handwriting
At Pye Bank, we use letter join as a whole school handwriting scheme. In EYFS and Year 1, letter formations are taught and consolidated. In Foundation stage they first focus on pencil grip, fine and gross motor skills. Once these are secured, they move onto the formation of lower-case letters, the size and shape. In Year 1 they focus on the formation of capital letters, numbers and symbols. Initially children learn how to write printed letters correctly before progressing to using joins and cursive letter formations in Y2. In KS2 the scheme builds on the skills taught in KS1 and children have the opportunity to write passages of text neatly and speedily and fill in forms using legible writing. With the support of Letter-Join pupils will have covered all the criteria necessary by the end of Year 6 to reach the standards set out in the National Curriculum for handwriting.