English

  Intent

We believe that strong written and oral communication skills, a wide vocabulary, and a rich and varied reading diet are essential to academic excellence across the curriculum. We aim to empower our children and equip them for their future with the skills, knowledge, and understanding they develop in reading, writing, and spelling. Teacher expertise is central to the delivery of the English curriculum.

Teachers deliver content with high expectations, passion, and precision, so that our children make excellent progress and become confident readers and writers.

We immerse children in the rich heritage of literacy that our country holds, by teaching using a text-based approach. Our driving texts, which are carefully chosen and mapped out across the school, are diverse and challenging to deepen, enrich and develop the children’s knowledge and skills.

The texts enable provocations for discussion and debate and encourage children to show respect for people of all faiths, race and gender, the environment, and all living things, ensuring they are well prepared for life in the rapidly changing world. These high-quality fiction and non-fiction books inspire the children to write using the skills and knowledge they are taught whilst exploring the texts.

Children write a wide range of genres and consider the purpose and audience to enhance the effectiveness of their writing. We continually provide the children the opportunity to improve and edit their work which results in excellence. Furthermore, we create opportunities for their written work to be celebrated, empowering the children to want to do even better.

We believe that reading unlocks the curriculum and that effective readers are effective writers. In reading, our children are encouraged to ask questions and to seek answers on the aspirational shared texts they read. They develop excellent comprehension skills through the skilled questioning planned for by teachers, in shared and guided reading sessions.

We aim for them to become sophisticated and confident readers with a strong understanding of what they have read, and the ability to articulate their understanding effectively. Early reading is led by our systematic, synthetic phonics programme and we encourage reading for pleasure across the curriculum from the moment children begin school.

At Lower Peover, we also model the application of the alphabetic code through phonics in shared reading and writing, both inside and outside of the phonics lesson and across the curriculum. We have a strong focus on language development for our children because we know that speaking and listening are crucial skills for reading and writing in all subjects. Comprehension At Lower Peover we value reading as a crucial life skill. By the time children leave us, they read confidently for meaning and regularly enjoy reading for pleasure. Our readers are equipped with the tools to tackle unfamiliar vocabulary. We encourage our children to see themselves as readers for both pleasure and purpose. Because we believe teaching every child to read is so important, we have a Reading Leader who drives the early reading programme in our school. This person is highly skilled at teaching phonics and reading, and they monitor and support our reading team, so everyone teaches with fidelity to the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised programme

Files to Download