English
Our aim is for all children to enjoy and excel in English. We believe that English is essential to everyday life and that all the skills of language are essential to participating fully as a member of society. Our high-quality English education therefore ensures our children are able to communicate their ideas and emotions to others and through their reading and listening, others can communicate with them. In addition, we recognise that reading in particular plays a vital role in acquiring knowledge and allows children to build on what they already know and learn well across the curriculum. As a result, our Barwell Curriculum places Reading at the core of all learning.
Reading
At Barwell Academy, we use knowledge organisers to outline the expectations for each year group within English. Learning in English does not involve learning isolated knowledge or facts but is a development of skills applied in increasing complexity on harder texts or at greater length. As such, our English Knowledge Organisers (which you can find for each year group below) have been designed in a cumulative manner and knowledge organisers for upper KS2 will contain prior knowledge from earlier in children’s learning. This is to ensure a consistent approach to terminology across the school and to allow regular opportunities to recall key understanding.
All children in our school children engage in daily fluency sessions which place reading fluency, expression and comprehension at their heart. Children have access to their own copy of a high-quality text that links to our wider Learning Journey themes. In addition, a range of picture books are also used to compliment the wider curriculum. Class teachers decide how to use these books to meet the needs of their class.
Wider Reading
Our school has two well-stocked libraries with a range of books at differing levels and on differing topics that children can access. Children in school are able to visit these regularly to change their reading books and choose reading material that appeals to them. For those who need it, we also have a selection of phonetically decodable books for children to enjoy and apply their phonics learning to.
Writing
We follow a Talk for Writing structure for our English sessions. Each unit involves a focus on poetry, fiction and non-fiction and covers a range of purposes for writing. During each unit, children learn model texts orally to internalise high quality examples of writing, providing a starting point for their own written work. Children use their reading skills to explore their model text alongside other good examples to deepen their understanding of new text types. In addition, they complete a range of writing tasks to practise new skills and structures as appropriate to the text type. By the end of a unit, children complete their own pieces of fiction and non-fiction writing to showcase their learning.
Please click on each year group to see our writing maps:
Year 3
Year 4
Year 5
Year 6
Spelling
Spelling is taught weekly as an isolated lesson. These lessons are designed to be regular, short exposure to curriculum spellings. Lessons focus on being able to spell the words, understand word meaning, how words are formed and to provide children with the necessary skills to apply their learning into other contexts.
For those children who require it, we run a comprehensive phonics intervention using the DFE approved systematic synthetic phonics teaching programme: Twinkl. This focuses on both segmenting and blending skills.
Year 3/4
Year 5/6
