English

At Richmond, our pedagogy for developing writing, imagination and creativity for our younger children, comes from Greg Botterill’s ‘Drawing Club’. ‘Drawing Club’ is linked to amazing books and gives children freedom, choice and purpose for writing. Children love to come to ‘Drawing Club’ and apply their developing language, phonics and writing skills when writing ‘magic codes’ to make their creative drawings come to life! 

Curious Quests, also from Greg Botterill, builds upon the Drawing Club adventures in writing in Year 1 and the beginning of Year 2, showing children that they CAN write and that their “pen is a magic wand.” “The Curious Quests is an immersive adventure into story, poetry, make-believe and giving children a childhood that brims with endless possibilities to invent, imagine and story dream. The Curious Quests combines short carpet sessions, group work and children exploring open-ended resources such as junk modelling, construction, playdough, role play and being outside.” We maximise opportunities to explore adventurous vocabulary, linked to texts, and all learning is linked to National Curriculum objectives and expectations for English.

 In Years 2-6, we use a book based approach for writing to continue to inspire and motivate children to become writers. This whole-school curriculum approach blends important themes with immersive classroom experiences to ignite the imagination of children using a range of high quality children's texts. The children's lives and the lives of others are reflected in the stories they read and cover a range of issues including social justice, representation, and diverse cultures. Through our texts, we teach reading, writing and grammar skills alongside developing children's vocabulary.

Children are immersed in rich literary experiences that spark curiosity and inspire meaningful reading and writing. Through drama, debate, and discussion, they explore important themes and write with purpose for real audiences.

Lessons don’t happen in isolation. Through Literacy Tree's carefully layered learning curriculum, we provide a comprehensive progression throughout the year and beyond. Writing opportunities are revisited to reinforce objectives and make learning stick.

 Grammar

The two links below out­line the gram­mat­i­cal lan­guage and objec­tives chil­dren will cover within each year group.  The glos­sary pro­vides def­i­n­i­tions and exam­ples of the terminology.

Gram­mar Overview

Eng­lish Glos­sary of Terms

Spelling

Daily discreet phonics lessons take place in EYFS and KS1 , and daily spelling sessions for children in KS2.

Children are taught the spellings 'rules' and 'patterns' outlined in the National Curriculum. Children access a longer, half an hour teaching session on a Monday, where new Spelling learning is introduced. This is then followed by four fifteen-minute sessions throughout the week. We base our sessions around: orthography and phonetic knowledge, etymology (history behind the words) and morphology (how the words are made up of different parts), the meanings of words and how to use them in sentences and a range of multi-sensory games and activities.

It is important to us that the children get the opportunity to explore the patterns and rules themselves. This is to give children the best chance at understanding and remembering the spelling of words, so that they can be applied to their independent writing. Your child will be sent home with details about the rule, and 5 words that link. Children will be tested on these 5 words, and 3-5 other words that link to their focus rule. 

The rules and patterns that each year group is taught are taken from the National Curriculum. More details can bee seen in the spelling overview.

Ways to support spelling at home:
- explore what the words mean, and how to use them in sentences
- break the word down into syllables or phonemes 
- do sensory activities like writing the words in colours, chalk and in sand
- use letter tiles or magnetic letters to mix up the letters and re-build the words (letter tiles can be made with small bits of paper and a pen)
- games where children can say and write words linked to the rule over and over again are good for memory

. 

Overviews

The National Cur­ricu­lum out­lines statu­tory require­ments for; Spo­ken Lan­guage, Read­ing — Word Recog­ni­tion and Com­pre­hen­sion, Writ­ing — Tran­scrip­tion, Hand­writ­ing, Com­po­si­tion, Vocab­u­lary, Gram­mar and Punc­tu­a­tion.  Each of the links below show which objec­tives will be cov­ered in each of the areas aforementioned.

Year 1 Eng­lish Overview

Year 2 Eng­lish Overview

Year 3 and 4 Eng­lish Overview

Year 5 and 6 Eng­lish Overview

Richmond English Policy