English

Intent

At St Oswald's, we aim to provide a language rich environment within which all pupils can learn to communicate efficiently, effectively, purposefully and with enjoyment through the spoken, printed and written word. We use the English curriculum from national curriculum programme of study as a basis for our curriculum and enrich our learning opportunities through quality texts in every class. The Early Years Framework provides the foundations for our English curriculum using quality texts to enstill a love of reading in our youngest children.

Emphasis is placed on learning to read and on the value of reading. On entering school, children are exposed to a variety of reading material and we aim to develop in the children a love and enthusiasm for reading whilst creating habitual and fluent readers.

Implementation

We aim to produce within the classroom an environment that provides and stimulates rich language experiences. Our curriculum is book led and we use quality texts to teach the reading and writing skills outlined in our skills progressions below. The teachers provide a climate that fosters individual competence in listening and speaking as well as reading and writing. We use the LAPS reading learning progression and the LAPS writing learning progression to plan, teach and assess assess our learners from Year 1 to Year 6.

Impact

All children at St Oswald's become competent readers and communicators in the written word. By the end of Key Stage 2, all pupils are able to read fluently,
and with confidence across all subjects and are ready to access the Key Stage 3. We give children the opportunity to write for as many different audiences and purposes as possible which results in our children having a love for writing in all subjects.

Reading

At St Oswald's we harness a love for reading in all our pupils. We believe that an enjoyment of reading is the key to unlocking a world of learning potential. The quality texts below are the core of our English curriculum and it is through these that we teach reading, writing and speaking and listening skills. As well as these texts, we link non-fiction texts and selected poetry to enrich the learning opportunities these stories provide.

Year 1 - Autumn

Year 1 - Spring

Year 1 - Summer

Year 2 - Autumn

Year 2 - Spring

Year 2 - Summer

Year 3

Year 4

Year 5

YEAR 6

Early Reading at St Oswald's

At St Oswald's we aim for all our children to enter Key Stage 2 as confident and fluent readers. We intend to foster a love of reading in all our pupils and for them to read for pleasure well beyond Key Stage 2.

In our Early Years Foundation Stage, children at St Oswald's are taught the sounds made by individual letters, digraphs (where two letters make one sound such as ‘ch’) and trigraphs (where three letters make one sound such as ‘igh’). They learn to segment words into their sounds such as c-oa-t and to blend them back together again to enable them to decode words they have sounded out. Phonics provides the building blocks for our early readers and writers. At St Oswald's we follow the Red Rose letters and sounds framework alongside a range of resources to engage and develop phonics knowledge and early reading skills in our youngest children.

In addition to this, our children learn to instantly recognise by sight the 100 high frequency words or tricky words. Some of these words are decodable such as ‘and’ whereas others are what we term ‘tricky’ (i.e. they are not decodable using phonic knowledge such as ‘one’). Learning these high frequency words enables the children to access texts and reduce the working memory load when approaching an unknown text.

In Key Stage 1, we continue to develop the children’s phonics knowledge by introducing further digraphs and trigraphs including alterative pronunciations for sounds already encountered. We integrate our phonics learning with our teaching of writing. By the time children move to Key Stage 2 (KS2), we want our children to be confident to read and write independently.

Click the links below to see our EYFS curriculum.

Autumn 1 Autumn 2 Spring 1 Spring 2 Summer 1 Summer 2