English

At John Wilkinson Primary School and Nursery, we teach English in an exciting, enjoyable and memorable way.  We believe that speaking, listening, reading and writing are fundamental life skills, which enable children to communicate effectively in all areas and equips them for the challenges they will face in the wider world.

The English curriculum covers four main elements – spoken language, reading, writing and grammar, punctuation and spelling. English at John Wilkinson is usually taught through a cross curricular text based approach linked to our wider curriculum but some elements are taught discretely.

Spoken Language

We have a strong focus on language development for our children as speaking and listening are crucial skills for reading and writing in all subjects.

Please our Spoken Language Progression document below.

Teaching Phonics and Early Reading

At John Wilkinson, we believe that all our children can become fluent readers.  We are proud to teach phonics and early reading through Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised, which is a systematic and synthetic phonics programme.

We start teaching the skills for phonics in Nursery following Little Wandle Foundations for Phonics, with lots of listening activities and games to tune pupils into their speaking and listening ability. In Reception and Year 1 we follow Little Wandle (Letters and Sounds Revised) progression, which ensures children build on their growing knowledge of the alphabetic code, mastering phonics to read and spell as they move through school.

Through our teaching of phonics, children are able to tackle unfamiliar words as they read. To ensure our pupils can apply their phonics knowledge and skills, we model the application of the alphabetic code through phonics in shared reading and writing, both inside and outside of the phonics lesson and across the curriculum.

To support parents with phonics at home we run parent information sessions in school and there are lots of useful tips and clips here about how to support your child at home.

https://www.littlewandlelettersandsounds.org.uk/resources/for-parents/

You can see the Little Wandle Programme Progression below to find out what we teach and when.

Writing

At John Wilkinson writing is taught systematically across the school daily (both in English lessons and other curriculum areas) Our approach is based on quality texts with a strong focus on vocabulary development and modelled, shared and guided writing building understanding of the text as a class over the teaching sequence before using the model to create an independent write.

In EYFS units are designed to build vocabulary and an awareness of how stories and information books are put together. From Y1 to Y6 each unit of work follows a similar writing sequence: understanding the structure of the text then developing the knowledge needed to write independently. This allows children to focus on specific grammatical and language features before using what they have learned to create our own independent text. The benefit of this whole-school, carefully sequenced approach is that previous learning can be built on effectively, giving all our children the opportunity to become fluent, expressive and confident writers.

We use the Letter Join scheme to teach handwriting and all classes have some sessions during the week where children are given time to develop their handwriting.  We aim for children to be able to form all letters and numerals by the end of Y1 so that children can be introduced to cursive joining during Y2.  We expect children to be joining by the end of Y2 as this helps children to write at greater length and also supports spelling in KS2.

Please see our Writing Progression Document below.

Grammar and Punctuation

Pupils in all years are taught to use appropriate elements of spelling, grammar and punctuation based on the National Curriculum guidelines and our progression document. Grammar and punctuation are built into writing lessons and emphasised when applying writing across the curriculum.

Spelling

In EYFS and Year 1, our children are taught discrete phonics every day using the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised programme. This teaches children how to segment words to spell them using phonics and also words which are ‘tricky’ because they cannot be sounded out. Spelling is then taught in Year 2 and across KS2 by following the Jane Considine Spelling Book sequences for Y2-Y6.  This is a sequential and progressive program, which is delivered in discrete sessions, providing a comprehensive year-by-year progression in the teaching of spelling. Children are a taught range of strategies for learning spellings, new learning is introduced and previous learning is practised.