Our English Curriculum

At Gleadless, our English curriculum is fundamental to children's learning across the wider curriculum. We believe that equipping our pupils with the ability to communicate effectively - whether in written or spoken language - and to engage both critically and respectfully with the views of others, helps them to become active and engaged members of society. Through our English curriculum we aim to develop children’s skills, knowledge and understanding so that they feel they have a voice, that it is valued and that they are confident to share this with others.

Literacy lessons are taught daily and use key texts - our ‘Class Books’ - to develop children’s reading comprehension and writing skills. Teaching sequences for units of literacy learning draw on the CLPE’s (Centre for Literacy in Primary Education) Power of Reading programme and follow a ‘reading into writing’ approach. This approach immerses our pupils in high quality and language-rich texts, supporting them to develop their comprehension skills in creative and engaging ways, and provides authentic and purposeful opportunities for writing. The class books also link to and support children’s learning through our immersive Learning Challenge Curriculum.

Writing:

We use a Talk 4 Writing approach to teaching writing. Talk for Writing is an engaging teaching framework developed by Pie Corbett, supported by Julia Strong. It is powerful because it is based on the principles of how children learn. It enables children to imitate the language they need for a particular topic orally, before reading and analysing it, and then writing their own version. It is planned and delivered in three phases: imitate, innovate and invent.

Our teaching of writing follows a clear sequence with high quality talk and dialogue running throughout: 

• Immerse: pupils are given a range of creative and engaging opportunities, including drama and art,  to explore the text and develop their reading comprehension skills.
• Analyse: pupils look at exemplary models of the text they are going to write - a ‘Perfect Piece’ - to develop their understanding of the key features of the text. They will also have an opportunity here to gather and build vocabulary they will use in their writing.
• SPaG: this part of the sequence allows pupils to develop their grammar, punctuation and spelling skills in a contextualised way. This means that they are exploring and practising the sentence level techniques used by authentic writers in order to develop their own writing.
• Plan: pupils will use drama, dialogue, story mapping and planning frames to prepare for writing. They will be supported to draw on the SPaG skills they have learned as well as the vocabulary they have built through the sequence.
• Write: pupils engage in shared writing with their teacher and then write independently using their plans and understanding of the key features of the text type.
• Review: at this point pupils will be supported through peer and teacher feedback to edit, redraft and improve their writing.
• Publish: whilst this is not part of every writing sequence, key writing outcomes are identified throughout the year where pupils are given the opportunity to ‘publish’ their writing in a range of different ways. This gives their writing purpose and develops personal pride in their achievements. A number of these pieces will be included in our Proud Books and shared with parents at our celebration events. 

Our long term plan for each year group identifies:

• key texts or class books
• purposeful writing outcomes which ensure coverage of different text genres
• National Curriculum grammar and punctuation objectives which are covered as part of the teaching of writing within each unit. 

Handwriting:

At Gleadless we follow the Martin Harvey handwriting scheme which is taught in short discrete handwriting sessions through the week. Pupils are supported to apply this to all their writing in KS2 through the use of plain paged writing books and line guides. One of the key aims of the Martin Harvey scheme is for pupils to take pride in their handwriting and presentation of their learning: our Proud Books and ‘published’ pieces of writing offer the opportunity for children to show off their skills and produce beautiful pieces of learning of which they can be proud.

Oracy: 

Oracy is a fundamental part of teaching and learning at Gleadless. It is the ability to express oneself fluently and grammatically in speech. Providing pupils with lots of opportunity for talk enables them to develop into clear and confident communicators, able to use their voice to articulate their thoughts and feelings. At Gleadless, oracy is interwoven into all aspects of the curriculum through the application of the oracy skills framework. We develop pupils' cognitive, social, linguistic and physical oracy skills by deliberate practice and careful scaffolding. Pupils are given talk structures to enable them to communicate in a range of ways; these talk structures become progressively more challenging as pupils move through each key stage. Children are encouraged to talk in full sentences at all times in school, and to apply their oracy skills across the curriculum.

Reading:

For information about Reading at Gleadless, see both our 'Reading' page and our 'Early Reading and Phonics' page.