English

At St Mary's, our belief is that children and staff should be engaged through an English curriculum that enables them to develop their writing alongside their reading. We believe that reading is the foundation that good writing is built upon and our approach to writing is delivered through age appropriate texts and stories across all Key Stages.

EYFS and Key Stage 1

Children develop their writing skills through a Talk 4 Writing approach. Through a story or book, the children's writing will develop through 3 structured stages:

Key Stage 2

As the children move into KS 2 (Key Stage 2), they will continue to build upon the skills they have developed using Talk 4 Writing through a Novel Studies approach. Through a range of high quality texts, children will read frequently as a class, within a group and on an individual basis; enabling numerous opportunities for them to write for a variety of purposes and audiences. At St Mary’s, we are passionate about fostering a love of reading at every opportunity, the books selected help inspire and engage our writers, whilst at the same time, help develop the children as readers at school and at home. The class novel underpins all our teaching of English at school, with grammar, punctuation, spelling and comprehension delivered in a context familiar to the children.

KS 2 Novels studied

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To enable us to engage and excite the children in their writing and reading, the novel study approach is more than just discreet lessons. The children are immersed in the novel, with classroom doors, classroom environment and displays all themed to the novel that is featured. This approach not only engages our young writers but helps them write for a purpose in every lesson.

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In order to help build and support our pupil’s understanding, we use the ‘Learn it, Try it, Publish it ’ approach within all our English lessons:

• During the ‘Learn it’ stage, the children ponder and predict what might happen in the story; through text marking, they look at word sentence and organisational features, as well as collect high quality vocabulary from the text which the children can use. The children play an active part in deconstructing the text and gathering content for writing. Alongside this, we examine and think about the audience and purpose of a text, helping us to make choices about the form our writing will take in later stages.

• In the ‘Try it’ stage of learning, children use the collected vocabulary and model it into sentences through shared writing. We also develop ideas by manipulating sentence structures, constructing paragraphs and using higher-level punctuation. Using this knowledge, our children are encouraged to independently create written pieces.

• Finally, in the ‘Publish it’ stage of their learning, the children self and peer assess written work to identify areas that could benefit from editing using the building blocks already provided in the earlier stages. Independence and creativity are celebrated during this stage and children are encouraged to take pride in their work through producing a final published piece.

Each stage of the process (Learn it, Try it, Publish it) is designed to support the children initially; slowly removing the support, to enable the children to demonstrate independence and find their own ‘voice’ in their narrative.

Editing

An integral part in enabling children to achieve their potential comes through the opportunities to edit. Editing is encouraged at various stages of the ‘Learn it, Try it, Publish it’ stages but it is the Publish it stage where children really get to see the power of editing, guided by self and peer assessments.  All St Mary’s KS 2 (and KS 1 more and more in the future) children are fortunate to have access to Chromebooks where they are taught and encouraged to manipulate and improve their writing via Google Classroom and Google Docs. This is built in to KS 2 from the outset and increases as the children develop and become more confident in using technology to enhance their writing.