English Information
We are fortunate to be located close to the landscape that inspired the writer AA Milne, famous for his books 'Winnie the Pooh'. We make use of the landscape around the school writing and learning opprtunities
At St Michael's Primary School, we believe that a high quality English curriculum should develop children’s skills in reading, writing, speaking, listening and discussion. To this end, we deliver an English curriculum that provides rich and purposeful learning opportunities. We want our children to have a positive attitude towards communication and to be able to independently and confidently express their emotions and ideas.
Our curriculum closely follows the National Curriculum for English 2014 and enables all of our children to:
● read easily, fluently and with good understanding
● develop the habit of reading widely and often, for both pleasure and information
● acquire a wide vocabulary, an understanding of grammar and a knowledge of linguistic conventions for reading, writing and spoken language
● appreciate our rich and varied literary heritage
● write clearly, accurately and coherently, adapting their language and style in and for a range of contexts, purposes and audiences
● use discussion in order to learn; they should be able to elaborate and explain clearly their understanding and ideas
● are competent in the arts of speaking and listening, making formal presentations, demonstrating to others and participating in debate
Phonics
The journey to independent reading and writing begins with Phonics. We are a Little Wandle Letters and Sound school and use these resources and books to teach phonics. We are very excited to now be giving out the books that accompany the scheme too. We are committed to raising the standard of teaching each year and think that a change will benefit our children and enable them to be confident readers.
Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised is a complete systematic synthetic phonics programme (SSP) developed for schools by schools. It is based on the original Letters and Sounds, but extensively revised to provide a complete teaching programme meeting all the expectations of the National Curriculum. We are very pleased to be using the scheme to teach phonics and are confident that our pupils will all excel in their journeys onto becoming independent readers and writers.
Reading
One of our aims here at St Michael’s is to promote a love of reading. We would like all children to read for pleasure, excite their imagination and extend their boundaries. We are fortunate to have a beautiful library, created by our PTA and opened in 2018. We are all incredibly thrilled to have such a wonderful place to inspire a new generation of readers. Our library is well stocked, inviting and has a range of books to suit even the most discerning reader. We are also visited by two different reading dogs each week to further foster a love of reading. We encourage all of our pupils to read a wide range of genres and text types and have a wide selection of magazines, fiction, non-fiction and poetry books in our school library and class reading corners.
If you need further assistance with reading, please find some useful links below:
Writing
At St Michael's, our children cover a range of writing styles. During English lessons, they have the opportunity to write in different genres and use their own creativity and imaginations. Writing is cross-curricular: in English so that children may use their imagination to write a fictional story; in Geography they may be persuading the government to stop cutting down trees and protect planet Earth and in Science they will use their skills to write instructions for an experiment.
Pupils learn from an early age that much of their writing will be read by an audience and therefore needs to be accurate, legible and appropriately presented. Our eldest children are given lots of opportunities to write to their Reception aged buddies and vice versa. Throughout Key Stage Two there is a progressive emphasis on the skills of planning, drafting, revising, proof-reading and the presentation of writing. All of our teaching staff use a scheme called CLPE Power of Reading to support their planning and teaching of writing.
Handwriting is taught and practised regularly, with the children learning to write in a cursive style from Year One onwards.
Spelling
Most people would agree that spelling matters. With raised expectations in the New Curriculum, accurate spelling now matters more to primary school teachers, parents and their children than ever before.
‘Writing down ideas fluently depends on effective transcription: that is, on spelling quickly and accurately through knowing the relationship between sounds and letters (phonics) and understanding the morphology (word structure) and orthography (spelling structure) of words.’ National Curriculum
For more information on spelling in the National Curriculum, follow the link and scroll down to Appendix 1, pages 50 -74.
How can we help our children to improve their spelling? Here are some tips….
Encourage a good reading habit. Reading regularly and widely will expose your child to lots of different types of words. Your child will be more likely to remember how to spell these words when they choose to use them later in their own writing.
Find out which words your child needs to learn to spell correctly by testing them. Then you can target these specific words together. Also, pick up on words that your child often misspells in their own writing and practise these. We all learn so much from our mistakes!
Make sure children understand why spelling is important and instil a sense of responsibility in checking their own spellings, as they write, to ensure accuracy. Using a word mat filled with high frequency / common exception words or a dictionary can be empowering for children and increases independence.
Try a little transcription! This is where you read out words, preferably as part of a sentence, and your child writes them down. This strengthens grapheme-phoneme mapping skills.
Ask your child to take a closer look at the word they are having difficulty spelling. Ask them how they will remember the spelling and which strategy they could best use to do this. Strategies include:
- write the word several times - encourage your child to use the following process: look at the word, say it, cover the word up so they can no longer see it, write the word, then check it against the correct spelling.
- draw the word as a spelling picture e.g. draw ‘clapping’ with two hands forming the two ‘p’s
- break the word into syllables e.g. consider = con + sid+er
- count the phonemes, i.e. split the word up into its individual sounds e.g. father = f+ a+ th+ er
- look for a word within a word e.g. accident in accidentally, toes in potatoes
- memory tricks e.g. because – Big Elephants Can Add Up Sums Easily; I before e except after c
- say it your way e.g. waz says was; pee-op-le = people
Learn about the fascinating origin of words in our amazing English language. Did you know that our words chutney, jodhpurs and pyjamas originated in India?
Lastly, if you have any concerns about spelling, do ask our very knowledgeable teachers who will be very happy to help you.