English
At Templenewsam Halton Primary School, the English curriculum aims to offer a broad, balanced and ambitious curriculum for all children.
We aim to create a love of language, reading and writing to promote confident, successful lifelong readers, writers and communicators. Our intent is to combine the teaching of reading and writing within a context that is meaningful, purposeful and creative. We will ensure the children acquire the key skills needed, building on prior learning and developing progression across the year groups. We want children to be able to express themselves confidently and for different purposes and audiences and so to help them communicate clearly, we will help them develop a secure understanding of grammar and spelling. The ability to read and write confidently is the gateway to academic success, improved ambition and lifelong learning for our children.
Writing
We aim to equip pupils with the skills and opportunities needed to write in order for them to feel valued as writers and appreciate others’ writing.
We want our children to be able to express ideas verbally and research the writing of others. We want to enable children to communicate effectively through both the spoken and written word and writing is linked closely to reading and oral storytelling. We provide pupils with the opportunities to write for real audiences which will make writing a meaningful, legitimate activity and will promote confidence and a sense of achievement.
Aims for our children are to:
- Write with confidence, enjoyment and clarity in appropriate genre forms to communicate their meaning to others.
- Understand the phonic and spelling system and use this to write confidently and with increasing accuracy.
- Plan, draft, revise, edit and publish their own writing and learn how to critically appraise their writing and that of others.
- Develop the technical vocabulary with which to discuss writing, i.e. the basics of sentence construction and punctuation and vocabulary associated with grammar.
- To develop fluent and legible handwriting.
- Use a wide range of specific/technical vocabulary appropriate to text type.
In school we follow a whole school writing process covering a range of genres. Each writing process begins with a hook to engage the children and allows them to explore existing texts.
Reading
At Templenewsam we support children to become confident, expressive and fluent readers who will develop a love of reading.
We aim for children to be able to:
- Use a wide range of strategies to decode meaning from text as well as having a sound grasp of phonics.
- Talk about books, confidently, offering opinions and preferences, for example having a favourite author or genre.
- Understand and gain a level of skill in their reading that enables them to support their own independent learning.
- Enjoy reading at home and at school, with a positive reading habit be it for pleasure or learning.
- Experience a wide range of different media and different texts to ensure a good understanding of text structure across the curriculum.
- Experience a range of texts from different cultures.
- Transfer learning in reading to their writing.
- Increase/ understand a wide range of vocabulary.