English: Learning Journey
English is at the heart of both education and our society. Within our school, it is vital that pupils are taught to communicate their ideas and emotions effectively through the four strands of our curriculum: reading, writing, grammar and speaking and listening. Our English curriculum puts the learner, through formative assessment, at the heart of the planning, teaching and learning process. To this end, we aim to provide children with an engaging and varied curriculum underpinned by the belief that developing children’s language and their ability to communicate effectively in a variety of ways is the key to their academic success as well as their love of longlife learning. At Danetree, we are confident that all aspects of literacy can be taught irrespective of children’s individual stage of development. With this in mind, we have developed a curriculum where the different aspects of the subject (writing, oracy, reading, spelling and handwriting) are taught rigourisly in a variety of contexts to ensure that children are able to communicate effectively for a range of purposes meeting the needs of different targeted audiences.
Our Vision and Rationale
At Danetree, we believe that communication, both written and orally, are life skills that should be encouraged and developed from a young age. We aim to provide an interesting and engaging English curriculum that is underpinned by the belief that developing children’s language skills is crucial to their success across all areas of the curriculum and to their love of longlife learning. To this end, we aim to support our children towards becoming skillful and imaginative writers who are able to write for a range of purposes and audiences, always selecting appropriate style, vocabulary and grammatical structures that will fully meet the purpose as well as the needs of the targeted audience.
The fundamentals of our Learning Journey
At Danetree, the teaching of writing is organised around a clear learning sequence where children study and engage with a high quality model text, and practise the grammar skills necessary for the genre through a series of short-burst writing activities, before progressing into extended writing, editing and publishing their written work using a range of presentational devices to meet the purpose of the text. In order to support this, we follow the Essential Writing English curriculum as this scheme of work inspires children to write a range of genres of writing for a specific and authentic audience. Through Essential Writing, the curriculum follows an immersion in high quality texts phase, followed by the skill building and composition stages as these three phases of teaching children to write are crucial to support children's literacy development.
Exposure to High Quality Texts
The National Curriculum for English states that reading enables pupils to acquire knowledge and build on what they already know. Based on this, we expose our children to a broad range of high quality texts which model the style, vocabulary and language required in each genre of writing. This will, consequently, equip children with the technical and creative knowledge required to enable them to successfully produce their own writing for different purposes.
Skill Building (grammar)
Often seen as the building blocks for writing, grammar is an essential part of the English Curriculum. Weekly discrete grammar lessons support the children in their grammatical understanding whilst teaching ensures that these objectives are interwoven into the writing learning journey so that children are given the chance to embed new concepts without dampening creativity. During the skill building stage of our learning journey, children engage in a series of short-burst writing activities as these work as a vehicle through which children rehearse the grammatical structures taught in each lesson.
Composition
This is the final stage of our learning journey where children have the opportunity to draw on the high quality texts they are now familiar with in order to plan and draft their own writing of the same genre and style. To this end, children use the grammatical structures, vocabulary and creativity they have learnt and practised during the skill building stage of the learning journey to communicate their ideas in a purposeful writing context before editing and publishing their written work for an audience.
Handwriting
Handwriting is a movement skill, which like reading and spelling, affects written communication across the curriculum. It is important that handwriting is taught effectively in order for children to develop a faster and more mature hand ready for secondary school and adult life. The teaching of handwriting at Danetree is frequent and includes regular opportunities for modelling, explanation and practice.
Please click here to read more about our handwriting expectations
Spelling
Spelling is a fundamental literacy skill that enables children to develop strong writing skills as they grow. Difficulties with spelling can interfere with their ability to communicate effectively, causing confusion and ultimately obstructing the idea that they may be trying to convey through writing. It is essential, therefore, that we help children to cultivate the required spelling skills in order to ensure they become literate and articulate adults.
At Danetree, we teach spelling through the Read, Write Inc programme, which is underpinned by phonics and covers the National curriculum requirements.
All classes are set spelling homework on a fortnightly basis, and most children will be set 10 words to learn. These words will be taken from the RWI unit of work they have just been taught; this allows them to practise and consolidate the new spelling rule. In addition to this, children will be given up to three words which are key vocabulary within their current curriculum subject. For example, a class studying ancient Rome may also be given, empire, Colosseum and aqueduct as these will be regularly used within their curriculum lessons. Children are tested fortnightly on these words through a ‘Chilli Challenge’ which they complete in their individual spelling books. This means the children have access to these words during writing lessons and, as a result, are able to incorporate them within their writing.
