English
English skills empower individuals to unlock their potential as independent lifelong learners. They have a significant impact on self-esteem, motivation and aspirations for the future. Being literate equips young people to be proactive in their own learning and to articulate their thoughts. In this way they grow in an understanding of themselves as individuals and as members of society.
Cadishead Primary School has a clear, consistent, whole school approach to the teaching and learning of English. Competence in reading is the key to independent learning and is given the highest priority, enabling the children to become enthusiastic, independent and reflective readers. Success in reading has a direct effect upon progress in all other areas of the curriculum.
Along with reading, writing is a major part of the curriculum and makes a significant contribution to the development of children as thinkers and learners.
Writing involves a set of complex skills that will not develop without structured teaching and practice. In Cadishead Primary School we are using a range of resources and initiatives to promote a child centred approach for writing. This works alongside our core targets of spelling, grammar and punctuation and speaking and listening. We value writing and work hard to achieve high standards from all children, within a positive writing ethos.
In reading Cadishead Primary School Aims To:
- Progressively develop children’s abilities to read words (decoding) as well as their abilities to read for understanding (reading comprehension) to ensure that they emerge as fluent, capable and full rounded readers
- Provide the children with the skills and strategies to develop their reading
- Enable children to develop their skills in reading for understanding including inference and deduction.
- Encourage the enjoyment of books and reading so that the children develop a life-long love of books
- Develop a critical appreciation of what they read
- Ensure that children regularly access and become fluent in reading a wide range of fiction and non-fiction texts
- Develop research skills, using library and class texts, in conjunction with the ICT system
- Enable children to become informed and discerning users of the internet as an integral facet of their English research skills
- Develop a critical appreciation of the work of authors, poets and illustrators in order to emulate these skills in their own writing
- Encourage care and ownership of books
Writing
Our curriculum ensures that all children have plenty of opportunities to write for different purposes. We encourage writing through all curriculum areas and use quality reading texts to model examples of good writing. Writing is taught through a range of strategies. We believe that children need lots of rich speaking and drama activities to give them the imagination and the experiences that will equip them to become good writers.
As a school we have adopted “The Write Stuff” by Jane Considine to develop their understanding of the techniques used to build great texts. “The Write Stuff” follows a method called “Sentence Stacking” which refers to the fact that sentences are stacked together and organised into paragraphs and engages children with short, intensive moments of learning that they can then immediately apply to their own writing. An individual lesson is based on a sentence model, broken in to three chunks:
- Initiate section – a stimulus to capture the children’s imagination and set up a sentence. Vocabulary collection.
- Model section – the teacher models a sentence that outlines clear writing features and techniques.
- Enable section – the children write their sentence, following the model.
“The Write Stuff” also reinforces grammar through the use of:
The FANTASTICs which are an acronym that summarise the ideas of writing;
The Grammar Rainbow, a classroom tool that enables the teacher to drive key grammar messages;
The BOOMTASTICs which helps children capture 10 ways of adding drama and poetic devices to writing.
These three areas of writing make up our writing rainbow that is displayed in all classrooms and referred to as each class constructs their pieces of writing.
