Welcome to our English page

Mrs Quinton & Mrs Lawrence

English Leaders

Our Vision

The ability to read widely, think critically and strategically, and communicate is essential.  At Ryvers School, we teach these fundamental skills through an exciting and creative curriculum centred around our children’s needs.  We believe in a balanced and rigorous approach to teaching English and transferring learned skills across each curricular area. Effective English is intrinsically purposeful, flexible and dynamic, and continues to develop throughout an individual’s lifetime.

We help our children to achieve by explicitly modelling, and teaching, reading and writing strategies.  We ensure extensive time is given to support critical and creative discussions, sharing texts and providing purposeful reading, writing, speaking, and listening experiences.  Promotion and enhancement of home-school links in English at the forefront of our thinking.

We believe that English is vital to a child’s education and promotes an appreciation and love of reading, and lifelong learning.

Writing

Our main approach to writing is through The Write Stuff which has been created by an experienced English teacher and consultant called Jane Considine. There is a strong focus on choosing vocabulary and grammar to create specific effects on the audience. Children work together to choose vocabulary and the teacher models how to use this - alongside specific elements of grammar or punctuation - within sentences before the children write their own versions. The structure of the lessons helps to minimise cognitive load for the children.  You can get a feel of how these lessons will look in class by watching some of Jane's Sentence Stacking videos on YouTube.

We supplement these lessons with units from The Literacy Tree. Here the children explore a text and have the opportunity to respond by writing in a variety of genres e.g. a character description, a letter of complaint and a newspaper article.

Letter-Join Handwriting

We have adopted the Letter-join handwriting scheme across the whole school. A particular bonus of this scheme is that your children can access it at home. They will be given their login details in September of each year.

You can watch a parents' guide to using Letterjoin here: https://www.letterjoin.co.uk/videos/homelogin.mp4 

Recommended Reading

Please click on the link below for a recommended reading list for young children.

http://www.suecowley.co.uk/100-books-for-little-people.html

Each week, Oak National will feature a different author.

This week you can spend time with author Jacqueline Wilson (click on the image below). For future weeks, visit https://library.thenational.academy/