English
The person responsible for developing English at our school is Mr D Taylor.
English Curriculum Intent
English sits at the heart of our curriculum – it is through language, story and text that children learn to form concepts, connect ideas and express themselves. Through literacy, in all its forms, children learn to both make sense of the world and shape their place within it.
Across both writing and reading, we place a heavy emphasis on developing a child’s vocabulary. By the time children leave Yew Tree in Year 6, the limited word hoard they arrived with in Reception will have expanded enormously, giving them the language they need to understand sophisticated texts and express themselves in a wide range of contexts.
English Curriculum Implementation
English Long Term Plan 2022-23
Reading Progression of Skills
Writing Progression of Skills
By the time children leave Yew Tree Primary Academy they are competent readers who can recommend books to their peers, have a thirst for reading a range of genres including poetry, and participate in discussions about books.
Phonics
The person responsible for developing Phonics at our school is Ms E Hanlon.
Phonics is a way of teaching children how to read and write by developing their phonemic awareness—the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate different sounds used in the English language. Children learn the correspondence between these sounds and the spelling patterns (graphemes) that represent them. At Yew Tree, we place a strong emphasis on the teaching of phonics in the early years of reading and writing in order to give all children a solid foundation for learning. Because not all words in the English language comply to the rules of phonics we also teach so-called ‘sight words’ by repetition and retrieval.
Phonics lessons at Yew Tree are taught daily from Nursery up to Year 2. The sessions are short, engaging and memorable with an emphasis placed on revising a previously learned letter-sound correspondence, learning a new one, practicing this, and applying it to sentence level work.
The teaching of phonics begins in Nursery and Reception using the ‘Read, Write, Inc’ scheme which continues in Years 1 and 2, where children learn alternative spellings of the previously learned sounds and refining their knowledge to become more fluid readers and more accurate spellers.
During the Summer term in Year 1, children nationwide are tested on their phonic knowledge. This test helps us to identify children who have gaps in their phonic knowledge and may need further support in Year 2. The test is low-key and we make it stress-free for the children. The children are asked to read 40 words from a list, using their phonics to ‘sound out’ the word and then blend it if they need to. Parents are informed as to whether their child has achieved the national expectation within the child’s end-of-year reports.
Handwriting and Spelling
Handwriting is taught weekly from Reception to Year 6, beginning with mark making and patterns in Early Years all the way up to legible, joined handwriting in Year 6. When a child is deemed to have legible, joined writing they are awarded a pen license and badge to wear with pride!
Spelling is taught though the Literary Curriculum's Spelling Seeds.
These are directly linked to the main focus texts and Appendix One of the English National Curriculum.
