English

At Broughton we support the aim for English expressed within the National Curriculum: 'to promote high standards of literacy by equipping pupils with a strong command of the spoken and written word, and to develop their love of literature through widespread reading for enjoyment.' 

We aim for all of our pupils to be capable readers, writers, spellers and speakers, who can transfer their English skills to other subjects and who are prepared for the next steps in their learning. We nurture them as eloquent and articulate speakers and writers, who use a wide and purposeful vocabulary. We encourage them as readers, who select texts for purpose and pleasure. Books and reading are at the heart of everything we do. Our bespoke, book-based curriculum is built upon quality picture books, novels, non-fiction and poetry texts, which support children on the journey from reading to writing.

At Broughton, our reading aims are:

• To promote reading for pleasure.

• To promote confidence and positive attitudes to reading through access to a wide range of literature.

• To develop phonetic skills which lead to blending and reading accurately and fluently.

• To broaden their vocabulary.

• To develop comprehension skills, and enable children to analyse what they read and to participate in discussion and debate about texts.

• To encourage good home/school partnerships.

• To monitor each child’s progress through the use of a range of assessment strategies e.g. reading age tests, on-going reading observations, KLIPs, NFER tests etc.

• To support those children who require additional support with their reading.

Phonics is taught in a highly structured programme of daily lessons across EYFS and KS1. We use the Bug Club Phonics scheme to deliver these lessons, providing a synthetic approach to the teaching of phonics. Each session gives an opportunity for the children to revisit their previous learning, be taught new skills, practise together and apply what they have learned.

More information about phonics can be found in the above documents. Parents will also have the opportunity to attend our 'Meet the Teacher' sessions in the Autumn Term where phonics teaching strategies will be explained, enabling parents to support their children in learning to read. 

At Broughton, we encourage all our children to become “authors” in their own right through offering a multi-modal approach to writing. It is vital that children are provided with ‘real’ writing opportunities which is why lots of our writing happens around the classroom and not just in books. Children are equipped with the necessary tools to do this. Alongside this creative approach, children are given daily opportunities to focus on spelling, punctuation and grammatical structures.

Cedar Class had lots of fun reciting the journey the beast made in our new book ‘The Lonely Beast’.

In Yew class, we have created and performed scenes from Where the Wild Things Are. Role-playing can really help to deepen our understanding of stories. Here is one of our scenes:

After reading the Pied Piper, Year 3 created their own fairy tales and decided how to publish them. They are looking forward to sharing them with children in KS1.

Oak Class have been reading ‘Man on the Moon’.  We created aliens that have questions written on their legs.  The following day, we wrote down the instructions on how to create our aliens on the back of planets.

Elm Class have been reading 'The Adventures of Egg Box Dragon'. In the story a Magpie steals a dazzling diamond from the Queen's crown! We researched Magpies to learn some more about them, we used our computing skills to conduct our research and found out some brilliant facts. We then created our own Magpie fact file, we concentrated on using capital letters and full stops to demarcate simple sentences as well as including lots of interesting information!

3D have produced some brilliant pieces of writing based on the Stone Age in their English lessons. They have also published their own eBooks. Here are some great examples (just copy the links into your browser to view): 

https://read.bookcreator.com/iROazjlUQfs-4aER53CGjQZQuN77Piop3J5yBDO9taKbHtx1YCpNcg/5Uc9iqdjRJCHoPda_Ya8qQ

https://read.bookcreator.com/HTNIEAhjji7GJGb6oSKT-F9jrjTUh6-ZyqkQpPnRgdk2UgHR63ToJw/JLL_vUqdQPOpaFhR7Y2bbA

https://read.bookcreator.com/SU1ORxOMzB6NS4zv-CyAlqmgSmvTDPqwI74I-ege7NKuz-A_PXk7EA/UABeAFLlSOGAQD918P0J1Q

KS1 Multi-Modal Writing

This half term, KS1 have been reading ’10 Things I Can Do to Help My World’ and have created lots of interesting writing based around this. They have created paper plate Earths and have written ways to help our planet around it. They also decided that they wanted to help our planet by adopting an animal from the WWF so they wrote persuasively and created their own t-shirts to persuade the rest of the school to donate money to this cause. Through an assembly, the children shared their ideas with the school and from this they raised £291.80 for the WWF. Well done KS1 and a huge thank you to everyone who donated.

Multi-Modal Writing

The children in Key Stage 1 have been writing using a different approach. Instead of using our exercise books to record every piece of work, they have used paper, shoe boxes, card and anything else that we think may suit! The theory behind this is that children are writing for a purpose. Our children in Key Stage 1 absolutely love this approach and wanted to share some of their first pieces of work...

We wrote to North Wind explaining that Laura did not mean to lose her necklace of raindrops and then wondered how we might send them there...

We wrote in our story settings...

And used lots of different shapes of paper!

We made necklaces of raindrops and thought about which special power we might like to have...

Story editing is more fun when you get to do it with other people!