English
Our Intent at St George's
At St George’s, we teach pupils to speak, read and write with fluency and confidence, whilst mastering the mechanics of the English language effectively. We want to ignite a love of reading and writing in our youngest pupils and to nurture this love as pupils progress through the school thus enabling to communicate their thoughts, ideas and emotions effectively. The learning of key skills in English are essential in order to access all curriculum areas. The curriculum is focussed on making English inspiring and exciting, engaging all pupils with the joy and wonder of books.
Reading is prioritised with dedicated time to share a diverse reading spine and to learn essential skills for reading. Introduced in Reception, the highly structured Sounds-Write synthetics phonics programme is an incremental and code-oriented approach to the teaching of early reading and spelling. Books are assigned to promote the practice of current literacy skills and to improve confidence with reading fluency. Once children are confidently reading phonetically decodable books and have covered the whole of the extended code, they are moved onto our school’s ‘Reading Progression’, which enables progress to be tracked, as well as ensuring our pupils are challenged. Our reciprocal comprehension sessions provide a structured approach to improve reading skills through the teaching of key questioning, clarifying, summarising and predicting strategies. Embedding a culture of reading, provides opportunities to read both independently and aloud as well as allowing book talk and instilling a passion for storytelling, literature and vocabulary. Reading of quality literature is implicitly interwoven into our curriculum using key quality texts of varied genres and authors. This is enhanced by hosting multiple events, such as World Book Day and Sponsored Readathons.
Fostering a love of reading offers the opportunity to learn about and empathise with times, locations and cultures which are hugely different to our pupil’s own. Our new library provides regular access to a wide genre of text to support reading and enquiry learning. Through whole school events, we offer support for whole families to improve reading and literacy skills, and confidence around reading.
A sequence of high-quality, age-appropriate texts sparks pupils' interest in the writing process to cultivate confident storytellers and early story writers. In Reception, the ‘Talk for Writing’ approach builds pupil’s stamina using shared and guided teaching, developing the ability to independently write creatively with growing accuracy. From KS1, writing is inspired and enriched by opportunities to rehearse and internalise texts, motivating pupils to recreate or perform the stories they have experienced. By modelling a varied and rich array of stories and language choices, the curriculum develops a narrative understanding and response that paves a way into writing. The curriculum is planned progressively to take pupils on a writing journey which builds their knowledge of writing for context and purpose, while developing their understanding and purpose of vocabulary and grammatical features. Acquiring an upward spiral of vocabulary in a language rich environment, spelling rules and patterns are explored and effective strategies for learning, remembering, understanding and applying are taught. Delivery of Letter-Join develops a neat, legible, speedy handwriting style using continuous cursive letters and promotes a sense of pride in presentation of writing.
Reading
St Georges Church of England Academy - Reading and Phonics (stgeorges-darlington.co.uk)
St Georges Church of England Academy - Early Years Learning (stgeorges-darlington.co.uk)
Comprehension Overview
Comprehension Long Term Plan (y1-6)
Writing
Six Writing Principles of St George's
Progression in Writing Skills
