English Curriculum
English Overview
Our vision at Spring Meadow is for all children to develop a lifelong love of English and an enjoyment for literature. All children are provided with a great range of opportunities to develop and apply their English skills across the curriculum.
We aim to equip all children with the essential skills they will need for the rest of their educational journey and future careers. By the time they leave our school, we aim for all children to be able to express themselves clearly orally and in writing, take part in discussions, read fluently and have a broad and varied vocabulary. We ensure that all children are supported and encouraged to have high aspirations so they can reach their full potential.
Speaking and listening
Intent
We want children to feel confident in expressing their thoughts across a variety of situations. Our aim is for children to be able to understand their emotions and feel comfortable in communicating these. At Spring Meadow we develop and inspire creative, fluent and confident speakers. All children are encouraged to be independent and take an active part in spoken language activities at a level appropriate for them. For pre-verbal children our inclusive approach offers many other ways of communicating through Makaton, visual aids and Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC). This is a range of strategies and tools to help people who struggle with speech. These may be simple letter or picture boards or sophisticated computer-based systems. AAC helps someone to communicate as effectively as possible, in as many situations as possible.
We encourage children to share their ideas with peers and staff throughout the school ask questions, take part in discussions and construct arguments.
Implementation
We believe that speaking plays an important role in developing children’s thought processes and therefore we ensure that we provide plenty of opportunities for children to build and strengthen their oracy skills.
These opportunities include:
- Talk for Writing English lessons. Talk for Writing is an approach that we use from Nursery and continues throughout the school. Talk for Writing helps children become better talkers, listeners, readers and thinkers. It uses talk, actions, drama and images to fully immerse the children in a model text and its genre. The children are engaged in talking through ideas and refining their spoken and written approaches.
- Subject specific vocabulary being taught explicitly with word banks displayed in all classrooms on working walls.
- Talk partners used in all curriculum areas.
- Paired and collaborative work, including discussions and debates
- Listening to and discussing stories as a whole class.
- All staff develop children’s speaking and listening by using age-appropriate language, modelling and remodelling correct sentence structure and repetition using the my turn- your turn approach.
It is important to highlight that there are opportunities for children to develop their oracy skills outside the curriculum. These activities include:
- Assemblies.
- School Council– giving the children a chance to give their views about their school life.
- Pupil voice discussions in all subject areas.
Outside of school, we encourage parents to continue to model good speaking and listening practise including giving children opportunities to discuss their ideas, ask questions and pose arguments. Encouraging children to discuss and reflect on their day also allows them to develop their thoughts.
Impact
Speaking and listening based experiences highlighted in the implementation will have a positive impact on student’s confidence in speaking. Having being given the opportunities to talk throughout their curriculum and taught speaking and listening strategies, children have not only been given the potential to improve their academic outcomes, but also develop the social and emotional skills needed to become active citizens and effective communicators.
The impact of Speaking and listening will be evidenced through the monitoring of attainment and progress of all children by class teachers.
The English Lead will be responsible for monitoring the impact of Speaking and Listening standards across the school, through work scrutiny, planning scrutiny, learning walks and lesson observations and any other relevant monitoring activities. It is every class teacher’s responsibility to ensure Speaking and listening strategies are used effectively in every day teaching.
