English Intent

Our intention for pupils at Paxcroft is that their journey through our school equips them with the skills and attitudes to access and understand the wider world, including developing a life-long love of reading and writing. Through our selection of high quality texts making up our Reading Spine, we aim to immerse our children in rich literature and surround them with language that will develop their own vocabulary. We aim for children to develop a good understanding of audience and purpose so that they know how to write meaningfully within a given genre.

Reading

Children's early ability to read is heavily linked to their understanding of phonics. Nationally, every school must have an approved Systematic Synthetic Phonics Programme to ensure quality of teaching in this key area. Our school's Systematic Synthetic Phonics Programme is Sounds-Write and we are currently working in partnership with Ramsbury English Hub to ensure that this is embedded in our school. Sounds-Write is currently taught from Reception to Year 2. More details about Sounds-Write, and how it is implemented at Paxcroft, can be found on our phonics page.

Whilst children learn those key reading skills in their Sounds-Write lessons and apply them in the decodable books they take home, we also feel it is important that children develop a love of reading from an early age. From Reception to Year 6, we timetable reading into our day so that the children can have high-quality texts read to them by their class teachers. Where children in Reception and KS1 take home decodable books to practise their phonics, we also send each child home with a library book each week to promote reading for pleasure.

A school Reading Spine has been established with essential texts to be covered during the children's time at Paxcroft, giving us a jumping off point to link our reading and writing sessions to. We also regularly share and celebrate the books that we read as adults with the children, showing our children that reading is a life-long journey. Every year we celebrate World Book Day and invite the book fair in to promote that essential love of reading.

As children progress through their reading journey, later in KS1 and into KS2, they begin to access early chapter books and work through a range of book bands, scaling in difficulty. During this time, we are focusing on developing fluency and prosidy in the children's reading and encouraging the children to explore outside of their book bands in the school library. Eventually, children end up on a 'free reader' band and have full access to their class and school library for their reading books.

During KS2, there is a greater focus in reading sessions on developing comprehension. We are of the understanding, in reference to the 2023 DfE Reading Framework, that comprehension is the end result of an understanding of vocabulary and contextual information from a text, rather than a set of discrete skills. Our reading sessions often go beyond the initial Reading Spine and into non-fiction texts that give important contextual details, enriching the children's general knowledge and ability to digest what they have read.

Writing

Children's writing journey begins, at Paxcroft, in Reception. Children are taught the pre-cursor skills for early transcribing and, through their phonics lessons, begin to learn grapheme-phoneme correspondence to write CVC words. Early writing lessons focus on developing the transcription skills and word skills to respond to basic stimuli. As more and more of those early writing blocks fall into place, normally during the Spring term, children will begin to have lessons that focus more on story and sentence structures, with children beginning to orally rehearse and record their first sentences.

The children's coverage of genres is carefully mapped, from Reception through to Year 6. To begin with, much of the focus is put on writing to Entertain (narratives, descriptions, poems) and understanding the beat of a story. As children move into KS1, they also develop an understanding of writing to Inform (through instructions, recounts, explanations) and begin to look at writing to Persuade. Through KS2, children consolidate their understanding of Informing and Persuading and, in UKS2, look at writing to Discuss. 

Each unit of writing falls into three stages, which roughly coincide with a week's worth of learning:

1. Understanding structure

2. Understanding skills

3. Applying our understanding

To help children have a consistent understanding of the structure of different genre and text-types, we utilise techniques inspired by Pie Corbett's Talk4Writing such as 'boxing up' to help break a text down into component parts. We also have a progression of Writer's Toolkits that focus on the key skills needed for each style of writing - much of the week two content comes from this, as well as skills from the National Curriculum (which have been carefully mapped across each unit). As a school, we are also developing our use of sentence stems to support and scaffold our writers, and help them write with variety.

Spelling

Children's early ability to spell, as they progress through Reception and KS1, is very heavily tied to their understanding of phonics and their ability to link grapheme-phoneme correspondence. As mentioned, our school's Systematic Synthetic Phonics programme is Sounds-Write and much of our early work on securing children's ability to spell comes through phonics sessions. As children progress into Y2, we incorporate spelling patterns and the statutory word lists into our teaching.

In KS2, our spelling lessons are currently planned using No-Nonsense Spellings, with spelling pattern focuses alternating with focuses on statutory wordlists. Children are assessed regularly on their spellings and, where needed, interventions and scaffolds are put in place. As a school, we buy into SpellingFrame for KS2 as a resource to support the practising of spellings. Every child in KS2 has a login for SpellingFrame.

Handwriting

Developing fluent, legible handwriting is an important skill that is outlined in the National Curriculum. When children first start at Paxcroft, in Reception, we work on developing the pre-cursor skills to transcribing - writing posture and position, pencil grip and general fine motor ability. 

As children move from Reception into Year 1, we begin to teach children to join their letters, starting with an understanding of pre-cursive. We follow the LetterJoin programme of spelling, due to the logical sequencing of letter formation skills and their interactive resources and guides, which we believe support children's progress in this area. Children have regular handwriting sessions and, where needed, interventions to support letter formation and fine motor skills.

• Recommended Book List
  Take a look to see which books have been recommended for each year group

• Book recommendations
  Loved a book but not sure where to go next? Type in the title of your favourite book in the search bar to find other titles that you might enjoy

• Support for Reading
  Looking for advice for struggling or reluctant readers? Or maybe want to know more about phonics? Take a look at the Oxford Owl website.

• Teaching Wiki
  Not sure what your child is learning about in grammar? Some of the terms can be quite complicated. Use this website to search for any of the terms your child has mentioned.