English
We follow the Department for Education's National Curriculum programmes of study for Key Stages 1 and 2, details of which are published on the DfE's website. The National Curriculum for English aims 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. It aims to ensure that all pupils:
- read easily, fluently and with good understanding
- develop the habit of reading widely and often, for both pleasure and information
- acquire a wide vocabulary, an understanding of grammar and knowledge of linguistic conventions for reading, writing and spoken language
- appreciate our rich and varied literary heritage
- write clearly, accurately and coherently, adapting their language and style in and for a range of contexts, purposes and audiences
- use discussion in order to learn; they should be able to elaborate and explain clearly their understanding and ideas
- are competent in the arts of speaking and listening, making formal presentations, demonstrating to others and participating in debate.
We believe that speaking, listening, reading and writing are an essential part of all activities in the curriculum. We ensure that children will experience a wide range of creative and inspiring activities to develop these skills through independent and team work.
Writing
Our Writing curriculum vision is:
To write for the full range of purposes, appreciating how overall intent drives writerly choices.
We teach writing using our own bespoke policy for implementing the national curriculum.
Writing units last for between 2 and 3 weeks. Each term, children will learn to write in specific genres which are mapped out over the course of their time at Birkbeck to ensure a full and comprehensive knowledge base in all writing disciplines. The class text is used as a stimulus for a writing unit at least once per term. In every term, children also have one unit of spoken word which makes up the core aspect of our oracy curriculum. These units are either a speech, a debate or a performance poem and they last for one full week.
Our curriculum map specifies the genre to be taught, the text stimulus to be used as the starting point for the unit and the grammatical and technical knowledge to be taught within the unit. Each unit specifies new concepts to be taught and previously taught knowledge to be revisited. Each narrative unit also introduces children to a sentence structure taken directly from well renowned authors and this is also specified on the curriculum map. Our curriculum map is split into three areas:
Fiction (one unit of work per half term)
Non-fiction (one unit of work per half term)
Oracy (one unit of work per half term)
Although Oracy is woven into the teaching of all subjects through our teacher's approaches to teaching, it is explicitly taught in the form of poetry, debate and drama once per half term as part of our English curriculum and the focus we place on spoken word.
Fiction Writing overview
fiction yearly curriculum overview docx.pdf
Non-Fiction Writing overview
non fiction yearly overview docx.pdf
Oracy overview
oracy whole school plan docx.pdf
Alternatively, you can view a shorter summary of what children will learn in each term of the school year by visiting the page linked below.What is my child learning this term? Our Writing curriculum uses high quality texts as the stimulus for writing. These texts have been selected because of their literary quality but also to deliberately develop children's understanding of our five key literary themes. These are the same as the themes that drive our reading curriculum. They are:
Identity
Conflict
Ambition
Migration
Responsibility
We are very proud of the diversity that is woven into our Writing curriculum. We have deliberately woven in authors from a range of ethnic backgrounds and texts and videos that portray characters from an equally wide range of backgrounds enabling all children to see themselves in the authors, subject matter and the characters they explore as part of our curriculum.
Teachers use our Writing implementation guide to deliver our Writing curriculum. This is an in depth document that forms part of our induction and training schedule for new staff so that we can ensure consistency of approach to teaching in the subject. This implementation includes planning, sentence construction teaching in line with Jane Considine's sentence stacking methodology, vocabulary development, editing and redrafting and independent writing sequences which come at the end of every taught unit. In all lessons, teachers' decision making is guided by our principles of high quality teaching and learning. These are the same in all subject areas and what they mean to us in writing can be found in the document below:
teaching the writing curriculum.pdf
Spelling
At Birkbeck Primary school, we use the Read Write inc Phonics scheme as our DfE approved Systematic Synthetic Phonics approach. Through this approach, children learn to segment and blend words using their knowledge of the phonic code. We see the effectiveness of this approach and so we continue to use it when children are in Key stage 2.
Children in Years 3-6 learn spellings through phonemes and the ever-increasing irregular spellings of these phonemes in words. For example, in Year 3, children revisit the /a/ sound they first learned in Reception and identify this phoneme in words such as salmon, plait and guarantee. In their first spelling lesson each week, they learn that there are three further spellings of the phoneme /a/ - al , ai , ua. They spend time learning to spell these words and identifying words that follow these phonetic spelling patterns. This approach also helps us reinforce a confidence in phonics as the approach to reading and helps us to avoid unhelpful misconceptions such ‘not all words can be sounded out’.
In their second spelling lesson each week, children learn to spell Tier 2 words which also make use of the focus phoneme. We select these words from the 345 most commonly used Tier 2 words that feature in Christopher Such’s book, The art and Science of teaching Primary reading. We believe that children benefit from being able to spell these words because of their flexible use and broad contextual relevance.
In their third spelling lesson of the week, children learn to spell words which use the focus phoneme but that also use Latin and Greek roots. Over 60% of the words in the English language come from Latin and Greek roots and so learning to spell these words is of importance to children because they learn to apply the meaning of the roots every time they see them within other words and this helps them to understand the meaning of words they are encountering for the first time. For example, children who understand that the root ‘acro’ means ‘top’ are more likely to make inferences about the type of activity an acrobat does.
Each year group has their spelling phonemes and corresponding words mapped out for the entire year so that we can ensure well sequenced provision and systematic retrieval opportunities. You can see these coverage documents below:
Year 3
Year 4
Year 5
Year 6
Handwriting
Children in all year groups have one Handwriting session per week. In this session, they write sentences dictated by the class teacher, that use the words they have learned in their spelling lessons the previous week.
Teachers use the Handwriting policy to ensure the consistent teaching of handwriting across the school. This policy can be found below:
Assessment in Writing
Writing is formally assessed once per term across all year groups. Children's body of writing work to date is considered against the school's writing descriptors for the year group. We use PiXL's Writing assessment grids to do this.
Writing assessments are reported to parents and carers at parents evening every term.
Reading
Our Reading curriculum vision is:
To help children become fluent readers who are able to make meaningful connections across and between books that they have read and understand reading as being the key to better understanding the world.
Whole class reading is taught every day in Years 3 -6. Children in Year 1 and 2 who have completed the Phonics programme also do whole class reading every day. These lessons utilise our class core texts on a Monday and a Friday.
Core texts
We choose our core texts carefully to ensure that we are offering engaging and exciting reading opportunities to our children. Texts have been chosen because they offer opportunities for reading that are too good to miss. Class teachers are encouraged to choose other texts to complement their core text in each term where time allows.
All children are read aloud to every day and the core texts are used in these sessions. The core texts are also used in some reading lessons in Years 2-6. They are sequenced based on three principles:
Sentence structure
Story structure
Social relevance
Sentence structure
As children progress from Year 1 to Year 6, the complexity of their reading comprehension and linguistic skills evolves significantly. These sentences gradually become more complex, incorporating varied vocabulary and syntax as children move through the primary years, helping them to explore deeper meaning and engagement with texts.
In Year 1, simple and repetitive sentence structures are crucial for building early reading skills. The author Julia Donaldson does this throughout her texts, for example, in The Paper Dolls, the repeated use of the doll’s names ‘Ticky, Tacky, and Jackie the Backie and Jim with two noses and Jo with the bow’ gives the children the opportunity to join in with a regular rhythm and rhyme throughout the story.
By Year 3, children are typically confident at processing compound and complex sentences, allowing for greater nuance in storytelling and comprehension.
As they approach Year 6, exposure to a wide range of sentence structures prepares children for the demands of more sophisticated texts, equipping them with the necessary skills for critical analysis and interpretation.
Story structure
The progression in story structure from Years 1 to 6 is carefully designed to support students' development of reading skills as they progress through their education. This progression is rooted in cognitive and linguistic theories of reading development and aligns with the objectives outlined in the UK National Curriculum.
In KS1, children are building their foundational reading skills, including phonemic awareness, fluency and comprehension. In Year 1, they are introduced to simple narratives which are often contain repetitive phrases and clear beginning, middle and ends and continue to build on these foundational skills in Year 2 with more complex texts that require them to identify main ideas, infer meaning and make predictions.
In LKS2, children expand their vocabulary and deepen their understanding of text structure. They encounter longer texts and spend time analysing story elements and making inferences to deepen comprehension, identifying characters' traits, motivations, and feelings, as well as to recognising more complex story structures such as plot, conflict, and resolution. Children begin to examine the use of literary devices such as similes and metaphors and personification.
In UKS2, students explore themes and author's craft in greater depth. They identify themes that recur across different texts and analyse how authors develop these themes through characters, plot events, and symbolism. Children examine the use of literary devices such as foreshadowing, flashbacks, and figurative language to enhance meaning and evoke emotion.
Social relevance
We have also chosen the texts within our curriculum, in some part due to a desire to strategically build children’s understanding of equality, given that this is one of our school values and is derived from our overall curriculum ethos ‘To continually strive for social justice and equity of opportunity’. The document below details which books are read as whole class readers in each term of each year group. The key at the top of the document shows how we build up a sense of the different aspects of equality over time, cultivating a sense of what this concept means in its many different facets.
Whole class reading
Children read whole texts and extracts as part of their reading lessons. They read poetry, fiction and non-fiction and the fiction books they read are linked to our 5 literary themes:
Identity
Conflict
Ambition
Migration
Responsibility
This approach means that we know we are exposing children to a full and wide range of genres when reading and enables them to develop their understanding of links and connections between texts within the themes that they revisit throughout the curriculum. The full list of texts used in Years 3 - 6 can be seen below:
appendix 2 reading spines for all year groups docx.pdf
We know that background knowledge or a lack thereof is one of the biggest barriers to understanding reading that children face. For this reason, every reading lesson begins with an explanation of the historical and social context of the text about to be read and clarification of the meaning of the most challenging vocabulary included in the text.
Following this, lessons teach one of three elements of reading:
- Fluency
- Close reading
- Extended reading
You can read about what each of these are in detail in below:
The structure of the reading week: The elements we teach
Reading fluency:
The idea of reading fluency is the accurate reading of conventional text at a conventional rate, with appropriate prosody. Christopher Such identifies accuracy, automaticity and prosody as being the three elements of reading fluency which must be explicitly taught and cultivated, (Such, 2021) He goes on to define these three elements in the following ways:
Accuracy: the ability to decode written words without error or at least, where errors are rare.
Automaticity: the ability to read quickly and with relative ease (at a minimum of 90, and ideally around or beyond, 110 words per minute.)
Prosody: the ability to read in a way that mirrors the sounds of natural spoken language. This includes intonation (the rise and fall of the tone of voice,) stress (the prominence given to certain words or syllables) and rhythm
We believe that it is most effective to teach these three elements of reading fluency in concert, that is to teach them in such a way as to develop all three together and not in isolation.
To develop accuracy of reading, children need to see the sound-spelling correspondences they are encountering repeatedly until these correspondences become locked in long term memory as single units of meaning. This is why daily reading and discussion about reading is so important to build fluent reading. It also facilitates the development of pronunciation which in turn, aids comprehension as children attach unfamiliar words to existing words within their vocabulary.
In all lessons, teachers model reading sections of text with appropriate fluency. Then, children read in pairs, taking turns to listen, with each partner having the opportunity to read the extract in full. The listening partner follows along with a ruler under the line being read, to ensure that finger point reading and the robotic, monotonous tone of reading that this creates does not begin to become ingrained. The listening partner has the additional role of ensuring that they correct the intonation, rhythm and stress of the reading partner. This often involves modelling by re-reading a certain section of the text where punctuation has been ignored by the reading partner.
During this time, teachers have two roles:
- Support children who are encountering words within the text that are not in their existing vocabularies.
- Look out for patterns in difficulty. For example, specific uses of punctuation that lots of children are misreading. This should be modelled again by the teacher when they identify such a pattern.
The teacher will also ask questions about the content of what has been read, both during and after reading. This reminds children that fluency and understanding are dual aims of all reading. This also allows for discussions about what has been read and the context of it to be facilitated. This reminds children that reading fluently enables them to access discussions about the interesting things contained in the texts.
Extended reading:
Children are taught to engage in longer periods of text from Year 2 onwards. To do this, teachers will use one of the following four strategies:
- Teacher reads aloud to the class and children follow along with a ruler. The teacher will pause at various points and will ask children to say the next word in unison, ensuring they are actually following along.
- Children, selected by the teacher, read for a short period of time while others follow with a ruler. The teacher ensures that children follow along with their ruler by regularly changing the lead reader.
- Children read fluently in short bursts.
- Children read silently for extended periods from a shared text.
The above should be seen as a progression for children to move through as their competence improves. Early finishers will have questions to answer about the text they have read which they will do as and when they complete the reading.
The class teacher will stop children at various points during the extended reading to ask questions to probe understanding and to encourage consideration of wider themes and new features of the sentence structure in the text being read. It is important that for children to engage fully with the themes and conventions the text presents as learning opportunities, discussion takes place at the point of these elements being encountered. Teachers will have strategically planned stopping points as part of their planning for these sessions.
Close reading:
Close reading is about teaching children to analyse a text for specific themes, patterns and vocabulary choices. In these sessions, children will read through the text first in order to get a general sense of its meaning.
Following this first reading, the teacher will introduce the focus of the analysis. For example, this may be analysing the use of metaphor or other language device used by the author in the text. It could also involve exploring the creative use of punctuation or how a given effect is created and developed throughout a paragraph. Children may answer questions in these sessions, about what they have read but most of the time will be spent on either reading or discussing through the identified themes.
Each year group does a different amount of each of the three elements and their coverage timetables are set out below:
Year 1 and 2 - for those children who have completed the Phonics programme
|
Monday |
Tuesday |
Wednesday |
Thursday |
Friday |
|
Phonics (30 minutes) |
||||
|
Fluency (30 minutes) |
Extended reading (30 minutes) |
Fluency (30 minutes) |
Fluency (30 minutes) |
(30 minutes)
|
Year 3 and 4:
|
Monday |
Tuesday |
Wednesday |
Thursday |
Friday |
|
Fluency (30 minutes) |
Extended reading (30 minutes) |
Fluency (30 minutes) |
Close reading (30 minutes) |
Extended reading (3) Close reading (4)
|
Year 5 and 6:
|
Monday |
Tuesday |
Wednesday |
Thursday |
Friday |
|
Extended reading (30 minutes) |
Close reading (30 minutes) |
Fluency (Y5) Close reading (Y6) (30 minutes) |
Extended reading (30 minutes) |
Close reading
Comprehension strategy practice (30 minutes) |
Shared reading
At Birkbeck Primary school, we believe that it is essential that children hear reading aloud on a daily basis. Each year group has at least one core text per term (see above) and teachers read this book to their classes every day for a period of between 10 and 15 minutes. Not only does this model excellent rhythm, prosody and intonation but it also inspires an enjoyment of reading for our children.
1:1 reading in school and at home
In Reception and Key stage 1, children read 1:1 with an adult every week at least once per week. This is an opportunity for children to practice their prosody, automaticity and intonation and also serves as an assessment opportunity for adults who may then decide to move children up to the next book band.
In Key stage 2, specific children will read 1:1 with an adult every day to practice their fluency. Other children will read 1:1 with an adult less frequently but will be heard read aloud as part of reading lessons.
Children in Reception and Key stage 1 read their assigned phonics books at home. Once they have completed the Phonics programme, they read banded books which are stored in the library. The adult who reads with the child 1:1 will take them to change their book when they have finished it or are ready to move to the next band. They will record this in the child's reading record book. Parents and carers are expected to listen to their child read every day for a minimum of 10 minutes and should sign to say that this has taken place, in the reading record book. These will be checked and signed weekly by adults at school when they read 1:1 with the children.
In Key stage 2, children take one of the books from their year group reading spines (see above) home to read. They must sign their book out of the class library and return it there once they have finished the book. Parents and carers in Key stage 2 should hear their children read aloud once per day for at least 10 minutes and should sign the reading record book daily to confirm that this has taken place. The reading record books are checked and signed by adults at school weekly.
Some children in Key stage 2 benefit from reading banded books for longer and we support this. Children who benefit from reading these books are allowed to take these home and will be heard read 1:1 ever day by adults in school.
Assessment in Reading
Assessment in reading takes place once per term. We assess children's comprehension using Pixl tests and these provide us with a comparison with a sample of between 20,000 and 30,000 children from across the country. This means that the data we hold is robust as it is contextualised within such a large sample of children.
We also assess reading ages once per term and use the NFER reading age tests to do this.
Reading assessments are reported to parents and carers at parents evening every term.
