Southfield Park Primary School

English Curriculum Intent

At Southfield Park, we value the life skills all areas of English provide for our learners. As teachers, we consistently model the positive attitudes and enjoyment English resources bring. We believe it is an essential means of communication and underpins learning in every area of the curriculum. English is a powerful means of exploring different cultures, emotions, social situations as well as spiritual development.

AIMS

We have high expectations and value each of our learners as individuals. We aim to develop pupils’ abilities within an integrated programme of Speaking & Listening, Reading & Writing. Pupils will be given opportunities to develop their use, knowledge and understanding of spoken and written English within a broad and balanced curriculum, with opportunities to consolidate and reinforce taught English skills.

Pupils at Southfield Park Primary school will leave Year 6:

• reading and writing with confidence, fluency and understanding, using a range of independent strategies to take responsibility for their own learning including self-monitoring and correcting their own errors;
• with a love of reading and a desire to read for enjoyment;
• with an interest in words and their meanings; developing a growing vocabulary in relation to grammatical terminology;
• understanding a range of text types, media types and genres;
• able to write in a variety of styles and forms appropriate to the situation;
• using their developing creativity, imagination, inventiveness and critical awareness;
• having a suitable technical vocabulary to respectfully articulate their responses in any discussion.

Supporting your child to read

We aim to involve parents directly in the life of the school and thus in the development of children’s skills, knowledge and understanding in reading.

Below you will find a list of age-appropriate books is available for parents, suggesting recommendations for age-appropriate and engaging texts to purchase or borrow from the library. In addition, a prompt-sheet of questions is provided to support parents to further develop children’s comprehension skills when at home, and you can click here for a link to the Phonics Workshop video.

Reading for pleasure

	Our school library is a welcoming, relaxing space for children to select a book of their choice and even spend time enjoying it. A wide range of engaging books are organised according to genre to help children find what they are looking for. Thanks to our kind parent volunteers, every class has the opportunity to visit the library and choose/change a book once a week. As well as this, every classroom has a vibrant, engaging and regularly updated ‘Book Corner’. These are designed to be inviting spaces that promote and offer high-quality children’s literature which are signposted according to current topics and interests. Children are given ownership of this space and encouraged to discuss the books they have read and make reading recommendations for peers. All classes have at least one session of purposeful ‘reading for pleasure’ where children can enjoy their current reading book in a calm and focused environment. Across the school, class teachers model the enjoyment of reading through a carefully chosen class text, promoting a healthy and regular relationship with reading and re-emphasise how it is a priority within our school. Class books are selected with the aim of exposing the children to interesting characters, current topics, good sentence structure and high quality vocabulary. We also strive to ensure that the texts on offer represent the diverse make-up of our school community.