English Lead - Mrs Emma Fisher
Early Reading Leader - Mrs Laura Skelding
English Curriculum
The English curriculum at St. Botolph's aims to develop children’s skills in reading, writing, speaking and listening in a robust and responsive way. It also aims to develop a love of reading, writing and language which will last our children a lifetime and enable them to fulfil their potential once they leave us.
We use have developed our own bespoke reading and writing curriculum at St. Botolph's to ensure all children have access to a wide range of reading materials and writing genres.
The overarching aim for English in the national curriculum is to promote high standards of language and literacy by equipping pupils with a strong command of the spoken and written language and to develop their love of literature through widespread reading for enjoyment. The national curriculum for English aims to ensure that all pupils:
- read easily, fluently and with good understanding
- develop the habit of reading widely and often, for both pleasure and information
- acquire a wide vocabulary, an understanding of grammar and knowledge of linguistic conventions for reading, writing and spoken language
- appreciate our rich and varied literary heritage
- write clearly, accurately and coherently, adapting their language and style in and for a range of contexts, purposes and audiences
- use discussion in order to learn; they should be able to elaborate and explain clearly their understanding and ideas
- are competent in the arts of speaking and listening, making formal presentations, demonstrating to others and participating in debate.
How we teach reading
Our aim is to ensure that, by the end of their primary education at St. Botolph's, all of our pupils are able to read fluently, and with confidence, in any subject in their forthcoming secondary education. This is in addition to seeing themselves as a reader who enjoys reading for choice, pleasure, interest, challenge and enjoyment.
In EYFS and Key Stage 1 reading is taught through the enjoyment of listening to and partaking in stories. The love of reading begins here and at St. Botolph's we immerse our pupils in books. RWI phonics is introduced in nursery and all our EYFS pupils have this solid phonic foundation of learning before they move into year 1.
We expect pupils at St. Botolph's to develop a habit of reading widely and often, for both pleasure and information. Reading for pleasure is something that is a key focus at our academy and all classes have a dedicated Reading Area where children are given the opportunity to access a range of books in a comfortable space. All year groups have a wide range of designated fiction, non-fiction and poetry books that they can choose from to read. Our library is also hugely well stocked, providing pupils with the opportunity to choose books that interest them. A wealth of evidence is available for demonstrating how enjoyment of reading has a positive impact on attainment and wellbeing for pupils. With this knowledge, we prioritise Reading for Pleasure.
From year 2, we focus primarily on vocabulary instruction and fluency. Thyis enables the children to gain a real understanding of words and their meaning within the text they are reading. After listening to the text being read, reading it for themselves and listening to their partner read, the children become confident in the reading and understanding of that text. We then begin to develop comprehension skills by asking questions that require pupils to use retrieval, vocabulary, inference and summarising skills. This happens both verbally and in written form. For our reading lessons, we zoom into parts of our class book, to ensure the children are reading and enjoying full books and not just extracts.
From year 2, we also use Accelerated Reader. All our books in the library have a comprehension quiz linked to the book in the form of an online quiz.
Once a pupil has completed a book, they take a quiz. This assesses whether they have understood what they have read.