English

English Intent

The study of English is vital across the school’s curriculum as it develops children’s ability to listen, speak, read and write for a wide range of purposes; this includes communicating their ideas, views and feelings.

At Coalway Junior School we follow the National Curriculum and have tailored it to suit the needs of our children.

Writing

With writing in particular, we aim to build our pupils by studying a wide range of text types and authors over the key stage. In total children will receive an in- depth focus on at least twelve well known authors and eight poets – including a particular focus on picture books. This enables a child a broad perspective of writing which will begin to shape their own individual writing style.

At Coalway, we use The Write Stuff to guide our writing curriculum.

The Write Stuff is based on two guiding principles; teaching sequences that slide between experience days and sentence stacking lessons. With modelling at the heart of them, the sentence stacking lessons are broken into bite-sized chunks and taught under the structural framework of The Writing Rainbow. Teachers prepare children for writing by modelling the ideas, grammar or techniques of writing. 

Key aspects of The Write Stuff system include: 

🌟 The Write Stuff builds pupils’ confidence with sentence structure. 

🌟 The approach widens the repertoire of writing options for pupils. 

🌟 Pupils gain an understanding of the ‘whole’ piece that they are writing. 

🌟 Organisation of their ideas and cohesion between them is strengthened. 

Phonics

All staff are trained to deliver the Little Wandle phonics program. This is vital as it carries on their learning from the infant school and allows our staff to put in place the best intervention and support.

Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised is a complete systematic synthetic phonics programme (SSP) developed for schools by schools. Based on the original Letters and Sounds, but extensively revised to provide a complete teaching programme meeting all the expectations of the National Curriculum, the Ofsted Deep Dive into reading and preparing your children to go beyond the expectations of the Phonics Screening Check.

Reading

With reading, we aim to build our pupils by offering and studying a wide range of fiction, non-fiction and ‘real-world’ reading. This allows them the opportunity to develop culturally, emotionally, intellectually, socially and spiritually.

Coalway Junior reading goals:

1)       Inspire a generation of writers and readers

2)       Build a skill set in order to attack ks3

3)       Widen vocabulary range

4)       Broaden ‘background knowledge’

5)       Create a ‘thirst for writing’ atmosphere for all pupils.

As of 2023, we at CJS are having a more focused approach on fluency and how it can improve children's reading ability across the curriculum. The EEF explains:

Fluent reading supports reading comprehension. When pupils read fluently, their cognitive resources can be redirected from focusing on decoding and onto comprehending the text. For this reason, fluency is sometimes described as a bridge from word recognition to comprehension.