English

Intent

At Harpur Hill Primary School and Nursery , English and the teaching of English is embedded across the curriculum. Our aim is to ensure that every child progresses in the areas of reading, writing, speaking and listening. We believe in supporting our children to love reading and writing. We recognise the importance of nurturing a culture where children take pride in their writing, can write clearly and accurately and adapt their language and style for a range of contexts. We believe in setting high standards in the presentation of writing along with setting the important foundations in spelling and grammar. We aim to inspire children in their writing by providing opportunities to develop and apply their writing skills across the curriculum.

We value reading as a key life skill and we are dedicated to enabling our pupils to become lifelong readers. We believe that through supporting our children to learn to read, they will be able to read to learn for the rest of their lives. Reading is key for academic success. We believe in developing reading fluency and all comprehension skills coupled with promoting a love of reading so all of our children can access the delights and rewards that reading provides.

Implementation

With these aims in mind, writing and reading opportunities are timetabled daily across all year groups. Daily guided reading sessions provide the children with opportunities to develop word reading and comprehension skills, incorporating all strands of reading comprehension using the VIPERS questioning model. Whole class guided reading is interwoven into English lessons.

In Reception, Year 1 and Year 2, daily phonics supports the development of early reading skills. In addition to the discrete daily reading, a diverse range of reading opportunities are embedded across the curriculum. Quality texts, which link to our History and Geography topics, are used as a lead into many writing opportunities where new vocabulary can be learnt and applied and whole class texts are shared with the children to allow time to listen to and enjoy stories. Vulnerable groups and those needing additional reading support are identified by class teachers and reading interventions are put in place to support the development of their reading. This may be small group comprehension work or additional daily reading to develop fluency and build confidence. Purchases of lower level, older interest books have been bought to support our less confident readers in KS2.

A recent overhaul of our reading scheme books lead to substantial new purchases from a variety of different publishers and complete re-banding of our individual reading books. In classrooms, children are able to choose their own book, from the level that they are currently working enabling the children to choose a book that is of interest to them. Similarly, new purchases have been made to improve the selection of phonics books available to the children, along with accessing Ebooks for group reading tasks. Reading is celebrated at Harpur Hill Primary School and Nursery and there are many opportunities for the children to develop and enhance their love of reading across the school year. We have a fantastic library that all children can visit to share stories and take out books. Our book week coincides with World book day. We spend the week focusing on reading, with competitions, author visits, creative activities and sharing stories to expose our children to new authors and promote the enjoyment of reading.

At Harpur Hill, we ensure that the teaching of writing is purposeful and there is a clear progression for all children. In line with the national curriculum, we ensure that each year group is teaching the explicit grammar, punctuation and spelling objectives required for that age groups. As well as teaching the national curriculum objectives, teachers are able to embed the skills throughout the year in cross-curricular writing opportunities and ensure that most children are achieving the objectives at the expected level and that some children can achieve at a greater depth standard.

Writing is taught through the use of a quality texts, which exposes the children to inference, high-level vocabulary, a range of punctuation and characterisation. Each text is purposefully selected in order to promote a love of reading, engagement and high quality writing from each child. Writing is celebrated across the school with displays of high quality writing along with sharing successes for the children in our Good News assemblies.

Impact

• Our pupils enjoy reading and are exposed to a broad range of texts and authors.
• Successful readers are nurtured through the good teaching of both language comprehension and word reading.
• Pupils have a good range of vocabulary that they are able to apply in their writing.
• Pupils have a good knowledge of how to adapt their writing for different purposes and   audiences.                                                  
• Pupils are able to identify, use and apply grammatical features in their writing effectively across the curriculum.
• We foster a community of enthusiastic and engaged readers and writers who we hope will carry forward the high aspirations and creativity that has been encouraged at Harpur Hill Primary School and Nursery as they move forward in their education.

Long term Plan – English / Topic  2022 / 2023