English curriculum
We follow the National Curriculum for all aspects of the English Curriculum. Developing a love of reading, and the importance of this for our children both now and in the future, lies at the heart of our English curriculum.
Our ELAN English curriculum is made up of progressively sequence learning journeys for Year 2 to Year 6. These are led using a quality text as the stimulus, this may be fiction (including poetry) or non-fiction.
In Early Years and Year 1, our English curriculum is focused upon early reading, early writing and phonics so that all children have developed an understanding of and confidence with:
- storytelling
- vocabulary
- sentence sense
- comprehension
- handwriting
- phonics
Reading
At Banwell, children listen for enjoyment to high quality children’s literature read aloud every day. In line with the Faster Read research of Julia Sutherland, the text selected is slightly more challenging than the most able reader in the class would be able to access for themselves.
Reading is taught as part of daily English lessons. Using high quality children’s literature, the teacher models, and children are supported to engage in a range of self-regulating reading comprehension activities including picture-talk, book-talk, summarising, story-mapping, written response, hot-seating and prediction.
Reading is also developed during history, geography and religion lessons, key vocabulary is pre-taught before the teacher reads the text aloud. Pupils track the text
This is a daily 20-minute reading lesson. Children are grouped according to reading ability. During the course of a week, each group engages in a range of tasks.
Spelling
“My spelling is Wobbly. It’s good spelling but it Wobbles, and the letters get in the wrong places.”
Winnie the Pooh, A.A.Milne
At Banwell, we teach the National Curriculum and use the Extend Year 2 -6 spelling programme. We believe that spelling needs to be actively taught. This programme allows for systematic, explicit and interactive teaching of spelling which encourages children to investigate and understand how our spelling system works.
By building on children’s knowledge of phonics (how the 26 letters of the alphabet represent approximately 44 sounds in the English language in approximately 140 different ways) children will have the tools to spell 85% of root words. In Year 2 and Key Stage 2, we teach children the morphology of words (how words are grouped into families, related to each other by a combination of form, grammar and meaning). By mastering basic morphological principles, children will have a way of working out the spelling of over half a million words.
The remaining words are irregular. We use etymology (the stories behind the spelling of certain words) and graphic strategies to help children to learn these spellings
Handwriting
At Banwell we use the Extend Handwriting Programme which provides handwriting guidance for Year R - 6. This is an integral part of Extend Letters and Sounds - a complete curriculum for phonics, early reading and writing, a validated systematic, synthetic phonics programme. The programme also provides guidance on learning to join in Year 2 and teaching handwriting in key stage 2.
