English Curriculum
We believe that at CherryFold Community Primary School, English is at the heart of the curriculum. Through language, story and text, we will help children develop the skills and knowledge they need to enable them to convey meaning orally and write creatively. We want children to enjoy and appreciate literature in all of it’s rich tapestry.
Literacy enables children both to communicate with others effectively for a variety of purposes and to examine their own and others’ experiences, feelings and ideas, giving these order and meaning. Because literacy is central to children’s intellectual, emotional and social development it has an essential role across the curriculum and helps pupils’ learning to be coherent and progressive/continuous.
Across both writing and reading, we ensure/place a heavy emphasis on developing children’s vocabulary. By the time children leave Cherryfold in Year 6, the limited word bank they arrived with in Reception will have grown considerably, giving them the language they need to understand more complicated texts and express themselves in a variety of contexts.
Writing
In all year groups, we teach writing through high-quality texts – ranging from picture books in Reception/LKS1 to more complicated novels in KS2. Children are constantly immersed in real-life experiences, such as school trips, enrichment days. Over their time in school, children will write a variety of fiction and non-fiction texts, including recounts, newspaper reports, explanation texts, persuasive texts, plays, poems. We use drama, role-play, storytelling and discussion to engage their imagination, before moving on to vocabulary exploration, grammar and creative writing.
Each Year Group follows the Lancashire English Unit plans.
Please see the curriculum map for each class below:
Here is some of our wonderful writing!
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| Cherry Fold English Policy Sept 2022.pdf | Download |
Reading
First and foremost, we want all children at Cherryfold to develop a life-long love of reading. As a result, we approach the teaching of reading from all angles, so as to miss no opportunity to spark a child’s interest.
Daily, Guided Reading Workshops focus on the skills of comprehension, first through unpicking vocabulary, then moving on to unlocking the meaning of whole texts, deduction and inferential questioning and critical appreciation.
Teachers read a huge variety of written material regularly with the children, fiction and non-fiction, stories, reports, diaries and poems. Each year group has access to a ‘Class Book Corner’ containing challenging and interesting novels for teachers to read to their classes, exposing children to language and classic stories which they may find too challenging to read independently. Children have time to listen to a class novel read by their teacher for 10 minutes every day.
We have a home-school reading system (up to Year 6), which requests that children read a book at the appropriate level for them, for at least twenty minutes each day. In Reception and Key Stage 1, children follow The Oxford Reading Tree Scheme, giving them a thorough grounding in the fundamentals. Moving up into Lower Key Stage 2, children follow the Accelerated Reader Programme.
We have a fantastic school library, where children can visit once they have read a book and change it for a new one. They can also take a book out for pleasure to read alongside their regular reading book and read with their teachers and share with each other in Independent Reading times. The library is also open before and after after school for children to change their books and engage in reading sessions with their parents.
We are lucky also to have school librarians, who read with children in the library during break and lunchtimes and help children if they need it, to change their reading books.
Each week we launch our Word Count Competition, the class announced with the most words wins a prize. Children can also gain a prize each week for achieving 100% on their Accelerated Reading quiz, winners are drawn out from our treasure chest each week in assembly. Finally, children can gain Accelerated Reader certificates each time they reach their next level of target points and badges awarded for the amount of words they have read, 250,000 – Bronze, 500,000 Silver, 1 million – Gold.
Alongside this, we have regular author visits, books fairs and World Book Day – one of the highlights of the year!