English

Intent
Bretherton Endowed CE Primary School believe that writing is a key skill for life both inside and out of education and that is why it features across all the subjects taught across our school. Our aim is to provide children with key transferrable writing skills to build on year on year, that can be used throughout each phase of their education and prepare them for secondary school and beyond.
 
Teaching children to write for a range of purposes and audiences can be very exciting, especially here at Bretherton where we provide children with a range of engaging texts to capture their imagination. We aim to provide the children with varied reasons for writing and believe that this not only produces higher quality writing, but allows our learners to apply their skills to a range of different contexts.
Writing across all subject areas will prepare our children for high school and the more in-depth approach to analysing, planning and innovating their writing.
 
Oracy underpins our writing curriculum in order to build vocabulary for all learners and increase understanding of trickier texts used across our curriculum. Discussion, questioning and learning texts with actions, all increase understanding and prepare our children with the tools they need in order to be successful in their writing. Our aim is for ALL learners to achieve their full potential in writing and we are committed to providing the scaffolds and challenge needed in order for our children to achieve this.

We aim to help our children develop these skills in the following ways:

  • introducing and deconstructing a wide variety of model texts, covering a variety of genres
  • by exposing and highlighting higher level vocabulary
  • giving children opportunities to write for an authentic purpose
  • ensuring children have opportunities to talk about and plan their writing
  • to explicitly model the author’s thoughts and rehearse writing
  • a solid understanding of grammar and ability to use it for effect
  • to provide high quality feedback, both verbally and written so that children can talk about their successes and next steps in an age appropriate way
  • by giving children the time and opportunity to evaluate, revise and edit their own work as well as offer feedback on the work of their peers
  • to be able to spell, not only the prescribed spelling words but also beyond, through the teaching of spelling rules
  • take pride in their work and its presentation, including their handwriting

Implementation

Our whole curriculum is shaped by our school vision which aims to enable all children, regardless of background, ability, additional needs, and to flourish to become the very best version of themselves they can possibly be. We teach the National Curriculum, supported by a clear skills and knowledge progression. This ensures that skills and knowledge are built on year by year and sequenced appropriately to maximise learning for all children. We have planned our writing curriculum on a two year cycle for our mixed age classes using the Literacy Tree curriculum. The Literary Curriculum is a complete, book-based approach using high quality resources and taught by staff who have accessed high quality CPD. The Teach Through a Text approach is used to ensure a consistent, cohesive pedagogy is used across a school. It has been developed by The Literacy Tree, a group of English specialists who have all been teachers, school leaders and moderators and it immerses children in a literary world, creating strong levels of engagement to provide meaningful and authentic contexts for learning. All plans include engaging starting points to generate interest, engage and activate inference. These link to the books’ themes and employ elements of dramatic conventions, which are maintained and addressed across the sequence.

Children become critical readers and acquire an authorial style as they encounter a wide-range of significant authors and a variety of fiction, non-fiction and poetry. This curriculum has been built and adapted to our children and our school.

Plans include explicit grammar objectives so that the grammar skills for writing are seen in context and can be applied within writing. These can be taught ‘discretely’ yet creatively, and still embedded firmly within the context of the book.

In addition, planning integrates spelling investigations and activities, so that patterns and rules can be explored, discovered and then used purposefully within writing.

In addition to the high quality texts and planning sequence, the Literacy Tree offers thematic links which help children make deeper connections with text as they build their literacy repertoire and can compare and contrast books. It embeds comprehension explicitly through prediction and influence and teaches language explicitly and encourages application in their writing. Most of all it offers both long and short writing opportunities for a wide variety of purposes and audiences. Children are encouraged to write in role, with bias and for a distinct audience, rather than writing in one fixed genre for the whole planning sequence.

Collectively the sequences help children build a literary repertoire; develop a knowledge of significant authors and prepares them for the subject content of critical reading at Key stage 3.

Impact

By the time children leave our school they will:

  • Make good progress from Reception
  • Have a love for writing and write for enjoyment
  • Be able to produce written work in all areas of the curriculum to a high standard
  • Be confident to write for a range of different purposes
  • As all aspects of English are an integral part of the curriculum, cross curricular writing standards have also improved and skills taught in the English lesson are transferred into other subjects; this shows consolidation of skills and a deeper understanding of how and when to use specific language, grammar and punctuation

 

Our English Curriculum
At Bretherton Endowed CE Primary School, we teach English by following the Literacy Tree. Literacy Tree is a complete, thematic approach to the teaching of primary English that places children’s literature at its core.


How does it work?
Literacy Tree is an award-winning platform which has designed a curriculum which immerses children in a literary world, therefore creating strong levels of engagement
to provide meaningful and authentic contexts for primary English. Children become critical readers and acquire an authorial style as they encounter a wide-range of significant authors and a variety of diverse fiction, non-fiction and poetry.


As a whole-school approach, children explore at least 100 literary texts and experience over 75 unique significant authors as they move through the school. It provides complete coverage of all National Curriculum expectations for writing composition, reading comprehension, grammar, punctuation, and vocabulary, as well as coverage of spelling. All plans lead to purposeful application within a wide variety of written outcomes.


At our school, the Literacy Tree texts are mapped out to ensure progression and National Curriculum coverage across all year groups. 


For more information about Literacy Tree, follow the link below:
https://literacytree.com

Files to Download

Other pages

Contact the School

Bretherton Endowed CE Primary School

South Road,
Bretherton,
Lancs
PR26 9AH

Headteacher & SENDCO | Mrs A Moxham

Head@bretherton.lancs.sch.uk

School Office Contact:

Mrs Paula Carlyon (Bursar) | Mrs Chrissy Mitchell (Business Support Officer)

Bursar@bretherton.lancs.sch.uk

NB: All documentation is in PDF format and is downloadable, however, if you require paper copies, please contact the School Office Manager