English

Our Intent

At Dean Bank Primary School, we believe that reading, writing and spoken communication are key life skills that every child should develop so they are prepared for the next steps in their learning. We use the English curriculum (using cross curricular links where appropriate) to develop the skills, knowledge and understanding that will enable our pupils to communicate effectively and creatively in spoken and written forms. We strive for our pupils to develop the habit of reading widely and often, for both pleasure and information; acquire a wide vocabulary; develop a secure understanding of English grammar and punctuation; and acquire a knowledge of linguistic conventions for reading, writing and spoken language.
Our English long term planning includes a wide range of texts to support children’s understanding of social and ethical issues, their understanding of specific authors, a range of cultures, language and vocabulary development and appreciation of classic texts. We aim for our pupils to develop mastery of the curriculum content for their year group and be confident enough to be able to apply the skills taught in English lessons in their other subjects. We strive for children to become more independent writers who develop confidence with the editing and redrafting process and can use self and peer assessment to reflect on their own and others’ writing.

Planning

English Texts Long Term Plan
Poetry Long Term Plan

Reading and Phonics

For more information regarding Reading and Phonics please click here.

Guided Reading

Prepositions

March 2023 – World Book Day

The whole school got involved with World Book Day. We did paired reading with children from other classes, a teacher reader swap, dressed up as our favourite characters and did lots of activities related to books.

February 2023 – Y3 Library Visit

The children in Y3 thoroughly enjoyed their trip to the library. They listened to a story and completed some activities before loaning some books to bring back to school.

February 2023 – National Storytelling Week

For National Storytelling Week, each class took part in a range of activities linked to telling stories. Some of the children wrote their own stories which they then read to another child in their class or a different year group. We also had lessons where the children were using props to tell stories and lots of examples of the children being creative.

January 2023 – Y6 Research

Y6 have started reading their class book ‘Goodnight Mister Tom’ and finding out more about life as evacuees during WW2. They worked in groups o carry out research using a range of sources to help with ideas for writing diary entries in role as evacuees.

If any of the children have older relatives who experienced life during the war, it would be great if they could ask them some questions to find out their experiences.

January 2023 – Y5 Reading

5C have been working in pairs to investigate inference skills to help to improve their reading.

December 2022 – Reading Plus

This term, the children in KS2 have started using an online reading program called Reading Plus. This aims to develop their silent reading fluency and comprehension skills and we are seeing some excellent results. A huge congratulations to Brooke from Y6 for being the first child to read over 150,000 words.

December 2022 – Y2 Library Visit

Lots of our classes have visited the local library this year. Our Y2 children recently visited the library to exchange their library books. They took part in a range of Roald Dahl themed activities including a treasure hunt, colouring and craft activities.

October 2022 – Y2 The Enormous Turnip

This half term, in English Y2 children have been reading ‘The Enormous Turnip’. The children read and followed a recipe on how to make a turnip soup. They used what they did to help them to write their own set of instructions in English.

September 2022 – Roald Dahl Day

We enjoyed exploring some of Roald Dahl’s stories and seeing the children dressed up in yellow or as some of his characters for Roald Dahl Day. Can you guess which characters these children from Y4 are pretending to be?

September 2022 – International Literacy Day Y3

For International Literacy Day, Year 3 discussed some of their favourite books, why reading is important and then wrote book reviews.

September 2022 – Y6 Poetry

To help the children to develop their understanding of poetry, we use lots of different techniques. In this lesson, the class were split into small groups with each group given the task of reading a section of the poem, adding actions to help others to understand it.

Archive Curriculum Work
You can view our Archived English Curriculum work on our website.