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English

At Ashtree School, English is taught throughout the day, not only through dedicated English lessons, but also through a wide variety of cross curricular activities.

In Early Years and Key Stage1 children receive a daily 20 minute phonics session and a reading practice session (3x per week). From September 2022, the school introduced a new phonics scheme based on Little Wandle. It follows the same progression of sounds as our existing scheme but this includes fully decodable books.

There is a parents section on the website if you would like to have a look for more detail:

www.littlewandlelettersandsounds.org.uk/resources/for-parents/

Phonics Lessons

The phonics lessons pupils now have are very similar to what we have previously delivered. Pupils progress through the phonics phases learning sounds, which develop into using these sounds to spell words.

As the children revisit the phase 3 graphemes they will learn a catchphrase to match the sounds. These become even more important when we start learning alternative spellings for the same grapheme.

e.g. ur curl the fur or er a bigger digger

As they learn different spellings they ‘grow the code’ and learn to use grapheme charts to help them choose the right spelling. These will be used later in the year.

The biggest change for our teaching is the way we teach tricky words. The new scheme teaches the children to apply their phonics knowledge to tricky words and explains why the word is tricky.

e.g. is. The i is phonetic but the ‘s’ makes a ‘z’ sound. This is what makes it tricky.

Of. The ‘o’ is phonetic but the ‘f’ makes a ‘v’ sound. This is what makes it tricky. The children are taught which bits of the words are phonetic and which bits are tricky.

The children will have a phonics assessment every 6 weeks.

English Lessons

Through their English lessons children will develop skills in transcription (spelling and handwriting), composition (thinking of ideas and structuring them in speech and writing) and in using grammar and Standard English.

Please find details of our curriculum and how pupils progress through it in the documents below:

Reading

Documents currently being updated (Nov 2023)

Writing

The overarching aim for English in the 2014 National Curriculum is to promote high standards of language and 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.

Please follow the link to see the English curriculum in full on the Government website.