“A writer is a world trapped inside a person” Victor Hugo
At KGS, we aim to unlock the wonderful, imaginary worlds inside each child’s mind by developing a community of pupils with a passion for reading and writing. To support our aim, English is at the heart of our learning, therefore, where possible, learning in English is linked with other subjects in addition to being taught as an independent subject.
When pupils read their imaginations are stimulated and this expands their understanding of the world. It helps them develop language skills whilst supporting and encouraging them to become proficient writers.
In order to immerse pupils in a range of reading, writing, speaking and listening, and drama activities we use Pearson’s Wordsmith as the basis for our English curriculum. Through this pupils and their teachers read and explore full texts as a basis for engaging in a range of creative activities to enhance their reading, grammar, spelling and creative writing skills.
Pupils are given a clear purpose to all reading and writing tasks. Whether it's a fictional extract in the style of an established author or a non-fiction guidebook to provide information, our pupils know why the quality of their writing matters: because we establish an intended reader for their texts.
We ensure that specific reading strategies are modelled providing pupils with a range of skills to draw upon. This includes scanning a text, making inferences, predicting outcomes, creating mental images and using quotes to support points of view. To further develop reading skills we embed comprehension lessons within our curriculum. Our interactive approach to this develops a confidence in both reading, and in answering questions based on the analysis of language.
We encourage our pupils to discover new texts, genres and authors. To support us in this aim each child in Key Stage 2 follows their own individually tailored reading journey through Scholastic ReadingPro. This allows the pupils to create their own independent reading list according to their Lexile range, comprehension ability and interests. Pupils can then choose from an exciting array of reading material in our library and their own classrooms: newspapers, classic texts, and non-fiction books are some examples of what is on offer.
The use of drama and talk for writing has a positive impact on learning. Class teachers use a range of techniques to promote the exploration of characters, situations and events in order to study a class text in greater depth. This process expands each pupils' imagination, and provides them with a range of ideas to improve their writing.
All phonics and spelling activities are fun, multi-sensory and where appropriate involve physical activity or group work, the aim being to meet all learning styles in the class. To support pupils with their understanding of grammatical concepts and enable them to apply these to their own writing, punctuation rules and techniques are drawn from shared texts; texts which the pupils have already been immersed in and have a good understanding of. We find that exploring these in this way, and embedding them creatively leads to successful learning.
Each year group within the school follows the English curriculum in an inspiring and creative way, building from the work done in the previous year. This ensures that from an early age the pupils follow a progressive learning journey and become accustomed to the way in which English is taught at KGS.
