English at MIS
At MIS we follow a text-based English curriculum ensuring that high quality texts inspire all reading and writing opportunities in school. The books that make up our curriculum have been carefully chosen to ensure breadth and balance over each term and across the academic year.
Our text-based English curriculum ensures that children have a deep understanding of literary forms, wider knowledge of the world, empathy for the human experience and language competency. The design of our English curriculum allows for language, grammar, phonics and spelling to be contextualised in meaningful ways enabling children to work at greater depth in both reading and writing.
Writing:
Our aim is for children to leave school being able to write with confidence and accuracy for a variety of purposes and audiences whilst developing their own individual flair.
Through our curriculum, we will help children develop the skills and knowledge that will enable them to communicate effectively and creatively through spoken and written language and equip them with the skills to become lifelong learners.
Our writing curriculum is designed to turn enthusiastic readers into writers who keenly express their thoughts, ideas and analyses into texts across a range of genres.
Children will:
- Be immersed in high quality literature
- Have experience of a breadth of texts including those that are visual and digital
- Be provided with meaningful opportunities to write for real purposes and audiences and to respond to writing as a reader
- Develop an understanding of the craft of writing by engaging meaningfully with professional authors and their processes
- Be immersed in the process of writing through modelling
- Develop their own authentic voice
- Have time and space to develop their own ideas in writing
- Build imagination and given time for oral rehearsal
- Be taught phonics, grammar and spelling which is embedded in context
- Have their writing celebrated writing authentic publication and presentation.
Speaking and Listening:
The spoken word is paramount in forming foundations for writing and promoting reading and writing, including children's understanding of how to shape and refine their work and employ spelling conventions and Standard English. Pupils are encouraged to participate in discussion and debate, asking and answering questions readily. We aim to provide all pupils with opportunities to develop skills and knowledge associated with drama.
We use a talk at MIS to enable children to read and write independently for a variety of audiences and purposes within different subjects. A key feature of our approach is that children internalise the language structures needed to write through 'talking the text', as well as close reading. The approach moves from dependence towards independence, with the teacher using shared and guided teaching to develop the ability in children to write creatively and powerfully.
Improving young children's vocabulary is of high priority.
We aim to:
- Provide children with a rich language environment
- Carefully select high-frequency words for explicit teaching
- Develop the number of words children know (breadth) and their understanding of relationships between words and the contexts in which words can be used (depth)
- Provide multiple opportunities to hear and use new vocabulary.
Reading and Phonics
Our aim at MIS is for all children to become confident, successful, fluent readers, enabling them to access all areas of the curriculum and become lifelong readers and learners.
Children will develop:
- Excellent phonic knowledge and skills
- Fluency and accuracy in reading across a wide range of contexts throughout the curriculum
- Knowledge and an extensive and rich vocabulary
- An excellent comprehension of texts
- The motivation to read for both study and for pleasure
- Extensive knowledge through having read a rich and varied range of texts.
Early phonic teaching begins immediately when a child joins our Early Years setting, whether this be in FS1 or FS2. In FS2 the focus is on Phase One of Letters and Sounds which concentrates on developing children's speaking and listening skills and lays the foundations for phonic work where correspondence is made between phonemes (sounds) and graphemes (letters). The emphasis during Phase 1 is to get children attuned to the sounds around them and ready to begin developing oral blending and segmenting skills. There may be some children who are introduced and begin letter – sound correspondence in FS1. This is usually once a child has a secure knowledge and understanding of sounds and is able to begin to orally blend and segment.
In FS2, Y1 and Y2 we use Read Write Inc phonics to support early reading. This systematic and consistent approach to phonics allows children to decode fluently and experience success as readers early in their academic journey.