English Intent:

‘One book, one pen, one child and one teacher can change the world’ – Malala Yousafzai.

We have created a curriculum which is bespoke to Croftlands Junior School children and encourages them to become enthusiastic and engaged with English. We aim to develop pupils’ abilities within an integrated programme of Speaking & Listening, Reading, Writing & Vocabulary. Pupils will be given opportunities to interrelate the requirements of English within a broad and balanced approach to the teaching of English across the curriculum, with opportunities to consolidate and reinforce taught literacy skills. We are committed to providing rich and varied opportunities for children to become literate pupils. Through our English Curriculum, we strive to teach the children how important their reading, writing, speaking and listening skills will be in the real world. By giving this context to their learning, the children understand the value of English to them now, and in their futures. We plan our texts carefully to ensure we widen the children’s knowledge of the world around them and we integrate our values to ensure we further nurture the children’s: compassion, creativity, curiosity, kindness, resilience and respect.

English Implementation:

At Croftlands Junior School, we want all of our pupils to be capable readers, writers, spellers and speakers, who can transfer their English skills to other curriculum subjects and who are prepared for the next steps in their education. Our English lessons develop pupils’ spoken language, reading, writing, grammar and vocabulary. We teach our pupils to speak clearly, to convey their ideas fluently and confidently and to ask questions.

Reading

Our pupils are encouraged to read for pleasure and to read widely through our school library. Class reading sessions help to foster a love of reading and stories throughout the school. We also enjoy reading a class novel, every day after lunchtime, to support reading for pleasure.  We are dedicated to fostering a love of reading for every child in school so we ensure to provide a wide range of texts in our library. We also enjoy ‘book talk’ in class to share our reading experiences.

School Librarians are passionate about reading and also help to promote reading throughout school. They support our lower school readers in their reading journey by listening to some read weekly.
We use Floppy Phonics for our phonics intervention programme. We see fantastic results from this intervention and it is taught either daily or for 2 to 3 sessions weekly to support children with their word reading.

We carry out fluency interventions across school using Little Wandle to support children who have completed their phonics journey but need further support to read fluently to support their understanding and joy of text.
Our whole class reading sessions cover a wide variety of both fiction and non-fiction texts and help to advance the children’s comprehension skills. Children learn to work on their comprehension skills using VIPERS (vocabulary, inference, predictions, explanation, retrieval and summary). Through these weekly sessions, children are taught to work on these skills to further their understanding and joy of text. We also develop these skills during our English lessons linked to our class text: comprehension is woven into everything we do.

Writing
We develop writing skills so that our children have the stamina and ability to write at the age expected standard. We develop these skills through texts and we find inspiration through events in such texts. From flying frogs in Lower School (Tuesday by David Wiesner) to Macbeth in Upper School, children learn to write using high quality work. We provide varied and exciting opportunities for writing for purpose and we encourage pupils to see themselves as authors and poets.

We also encourage children to write freely using ‘Quick Writes’ – this is where children are inspired by a picture and are free to write using whatever genre they want. We find this really fosters a love for writing and lets the children’s creative juices flow!

Children in Upper School have the opportunity to independently enter writing competitions and have their writing published, which many of our children have been.

We ensure writing across the curriculum through United Curriculum. We use this for science, geography, history and RE and this ensures children use their oracy and written skills not only in English, but in all subjects.

Handwriting sessions are taught weekly to instill the importance of good presentation and to support spelling through kinesthetic learning.

Spelling, punctuation and grammar.

Spelling is taught weekly and interwoven with our handwriting sessions. We use Spell Shed for our spelling and this programme ensures detailed teaching of spelling strategies, further explores and consolidates grammatical terms and exposes the children to a wide variety of vocabulary.

We teach grammar and punctuation weekly also, as this ensures children explicitly understand taught concepts. These concepts are then also interwoven into our writing sessions and we continually explore how to apply grammar and punctuation knowledge into our everyday work.

Oracy

We believe that it is vitally important that all children are able to communicate effectively and that everybody should have their voice heard. Therefore, oracy skills are at the heart of all of our lessons in English and beyond. Children are consistently given the opportunity to discuss their learning, whether it be in pairs or groups or with adults. Children are also given a wide variety of opportunities to perform in front of others using playscripts, poetry or even being news reporters! We believe in healthy debate to develop oracy skills and we enjoy partaking in said debates during Parliament Week but also throughout English by posing important questions linked to character’s actions in our texts.

English Impact:

The result of our teaching of English at Croftlands Junoir School is that pupils read and write with confidence, fluency and understanding, using a range of independent strategies, allowing them to take responsibility for their own learning including self-monitoring and correcting their own errors. They develop a love of reading and a desire to read for pleasure as well as for information.

Children progress, sustain their learning and develop transferrable skills.  With the implementation of the writing journey being well established and taught thoroughly, children are becoming more confident writers and by the time they are in Upper Key Stage 2, most genres of writing are familiar to them and the teaching can focus on creativity, writer’s craft, sustained writing and manipulation of grammar and punctuation skills.

Termly assessment is showing that children are progressing continuously throughout their time at Croftlands Junior School. Each year we have children achieving at a greater depth in their English skills. We hope that all the new and continue initiatives outlined above will help to boost children’s learning and progress further.

As all aspects of English are an integral part of the curriculum, through using United Curriculum, cross-curricular writing standards are also improving and skills taught in the English lessons are transferred into other subjects; this shows consolidation of skills and a deeper understanding of how and when to use specific grammar, punctuation and grammar objectives. 

We hope that as children move on from Croftlands Junior School to further their education and learning, that their creativity, passion for English and high aspirations travel with them and continue to grow and develop as they do.

Reading Project

Along with many other schools within our cluster, Furness Primary Collaborative, we have embarked on a significant reading project to improve reading outcomes across all schools. It is widely recognised that reading skills increase pupils' life chances. As a collaborative, we want to significantly raise standards in reading across Furness. In the first instance, this is focused on phonics and reading for pleasure. This is then progressing onto children's fluency. 

This project is being supported by a local business, Orcina Ltd, and is allowing us to invest significantly in quality reading resources and quality CPD.

We have purchased the Oxford University Press Floppy Phonics Teaching scheme to help us provide rigorous phonics intervention support to those children who need it.  We have also purchased the Little Wandle Fluency Scheme to provide fluency support to those children who need it.