English
Intent:
Be the best we can be now and in our futures: we believe the ability to communicate in spoken and written form (including reading, writing, speaking and listening) is a crucial skill for life; we are committed to mastering the basics so that children achieve high outcomes in English
Ambition for all: ensuring that no child’s circumstances define their outcomes: we believe that with the right support, every child can learn to read, write, speak and listen for a wide range of purposes
Nurture a healthy mind, body and soul: fostering a life-long love of the English language
Develop a crew mentality for our school, the Rock Ferry community and our world: teaching foundational skills for collaboration and challenging stereotypes through carefully selected books
Implement:
To put our intent into action, we put a high emphasis on developing key skill in English and devote time in our daily timetables to support this.
Every day in EYFS, children have:
Phonics session
Rhythm and rhyme to develop phonological awareness
Story read to them by an adult
Continuous provision planned to support their next steps in learning to read, write, speak and listen including opportunities to develop core gross and fine motor movements that are the bedrock of developing strong handwriting; opportunities to mark-make, read print, create story maps, hear and re-tell stories
Every day in Y1-Y6, children have:
English lesson
Phonics or spelling lesson
Guided reading group
Story read to them by an adult
Opportunities to read, write, speak and listen throughout the curriculum
For further detail about how we teach children to read, please see our phonics and reading page.
We plan at three levels: long-term, medium-term, short-term. We use Little Wandle Phonics, Ed Shed Spelling, Pathways to Read, Pathways to Write and Letter Join schemes to support the subject knowledge of our subject leader and class teachers at each stage of planning:
Long-Term: Our subject leader maps out what children should learn in each unit throughout school. This is mapped out by our subject leader because they see the bigger picture of English across the school, ensuring your child is taught everything required of the Early Years Framework and National Curriculum. In Early Years, early foundations for English is taught within the literacy area of Development Matters.
Our subject leader carefully considers the order content is taught across school so that what your child learns makes sense year on year. We deliberately plan opportunities to return to key ideas throughout your child’s time at Rock Ferry so your child can build lasting memory and deepen their understanding each time they return to a key concept.
Medium-Term: Teachers use the long-term plan to know what they need to teach. At the medium-term planning phase, they carefully consider the sequence of learning within a unit of work so that knowledge builds logically and gives children opportunity to return to ideas, apply them and refine their understanding.
Short-Term: Your child’s teacher plans each lesson for the learning sequence, considering how best to teach the content set out in the long-term and medium-term plans so that it sticks. When planning lessons, your child’s class teacher will consider the needs of your child and the class they are in. This may mean returning to ideas they have struggled to grasp in earlier lessons or putting adaptations in place to ensure everyone can access the lesson such as word banks, writing slopes and scaffolded responses.
Impact:
To ensure children have learned what we have intended them to, class teachers regularly plan small tasks within lessons that lets them see what your child has understood. This allows them to respond to your child’s need if they haven’t understood a key idea. This may be offering support or re-teaching within the lesson or adapting the following lesson plans to address bigger misconceptions.
Subject leaders and senior leaders regularly speak to children to see what they have remembered, look in their books to check the quality of their work and visit lessons. We also analyse the summative assessments made for cohorts, groups and individuals each term. We use this information to review the quality of our curriculum and identify any areas where we could make it even better.