JUNIOR CURRICULUM – ENGLISH
It is our intent at Cunningham Hill Junior School, to provide pupils with a high-quality education in English that will teach pupils to speak, read and write clearly and fluently so that they can communicate their ideas and emotions effectively and confidently to others in a wide range of circumstances, both in spoken and written form.
Reading
At Cunningham Hill, we recognise that success in reading can be hugely influential on a child’s future success, both academically and in the wider world. We aim for all children be inspired to read widely and fluently and to develop a love of reading for pleasure, as well as equipping them with the critical skills to analyse a variety of texts. We wish them to understand that reading can be a key tool for learning, both about the real world in which they live, and imaginary worlds that others have created. Through reading, we want our children to develop their own rich and varied vocabulary and an understanding of the power that words can hold.
To support learning of reading and to generate a love of reading we provide our children with a variety of opportunities:
- 15 minutes everyday to read for pleasure.
- Daily Reading Buddies for younger children to read to older children.
- Regular Library activities to investigate different genres of texts.
- Children have access to Accelerated Reader which provides children with ability appropriate quizzes to develop comprehension by earning points towards a reading target. The children then can win prizes for meeting these targets.
- Daily guided reading sessions. We teach reading in carousel activites each day in Year 3 to 5. In Year 6 we teach reading as a whole class in order to prepare them for Year 7 through the sharing of texts and discussions around the books they read.
- A whole school Reading Spine which outlines the books that children will cover each term in school. Each term, the spine includes books that: are chosen by the Literacy Tree English scheme, which are used in our daily English lessons; fiction and non-fiction texts relating to our topic; representative of our community and books that will be shared with the children though each term, through a shared class reader and in free reading time.
Writing
Our school teaches English by placing books at the core of our English curriculum, following The Literacy Tree approach of ‘teaching through a text’. This allows teachers to use the text as the context for the requirements of the national curriculum. Our approach ensures children are taught grammatical objectives in context and children have real reasons to write, whether to explain, persuade, inform or instruct. Writing in role using a range of genres is key to our approach and we would always model the tone and level of formality. Alongside this, we have spelling and handwriting curriculum which ensures progression in transcription across the Key Stage.
Speaking and Listening
We want our children to be confident in the arts of speaking and listening and to be able to use discussion to develop their learning as well as to allow them to communicate effectively in the wider world.