English 

At St John's, we believe that English is at the heart of our curriculum and is a gateway to learning through becoming independent readers and inspired as writers. Our English curriculum is designed to be both engaging and empowering. We follow the National Curriculum guidelines and ensure that our bespoke curriculum meets the needs of children and seeks to encourage children to be ambitious in their reading and writing.

We follow a process of learning links in English following the 6 Rs which are as follows;

Within each year group, children will have the opportunity to access a wide range of different texts, both fiction and non-fiction as well as immersing into poetry. Our English learning in classes is linked to our curriculum themes and children will gain a breadth of knowledge from historical and geographical facts, to past and current world issues as well as experiencing stories and ideas from different cultures and communities.   

Reading and Phonics

At St John's, we believe in igniting a love for reading that empowers children to become confident, inquisitive and passionate readers where reading is not only an enjoyable experience but acts as a portal to learning and exploration. Children start in Pre-School learning through play, rhymes, listening to stories then in Reception they learn phonics through 'Bug Club', this then progresses into Year 1 where they will learn more complex sounds and read more complex texts. They will begin their journey with retrieval and simple inference. Children will then progress to Year 2 where children who need it will still be supported in phonics but the focus will begin to be more on practice to become more fluent readers and on comprehension skills. 

In Key Stage 2 children will have whole class guided reading sessions three times per week as well as having a reading focus as the stimuli to them writing.

Reading with your child at home is vitally important and each year we have a different reading challenge to encourage children to read. This year our reading challenge is the 'Rare Species World Tour' Research suggest that reading just 10 minutes a day increases a child's general knowledge, vocabulary, fluency and comprehension as well as exposing them to almost 700,000 words annually. 

Recommended Book lists (Nursery to Year 6)

Below are some links to recommended book lists for children - they provide a great variety to choose from. 

• 100 Recommended reads for Pre-School download_for_offline
  download_for_offline100 Recommended reads for Pre-School
• 100 Recommended reads for Reception download_for_offline
  download_for_offline100 Recommended reads for Reception
• 100 Recommended reads for Year 1 download_for_offline
  download_for_offline100 Recommended reads for Year 1
• 100 Recommended reads for Year 2 download_for_offline
  download_for_offline100 Recommended reads for Year 2
• 100 Recommended reads for Year 3 download_for_offline
  download_for_offline100 Recommended reads for Year 3
• 100 Recommended reads for Year 4 download_for_offline
  download_for_offline100 Recommended reads for Year 4
• 100 Recommended reads for Year 5 download_for_offline
  download_for_offline100 Recommended reads for Year 5
• 100 Recommended reads for Year 6 download_for_offline
  download_for_offline100 Recommended reads for Year 6

Writing (including handwriting and grammar)

At St John's, we believe in encouraging every child to see themselves as authors, helping to ignite their creativity through engaging lessons which bring the written word to life. We have developed a bespoke writing curriculum based around our curriculum themes and built upon the importance of writing for a purpose and an audience. Within this we will develop children's composition and transitional skills. Our 5 purposes are as follows

During English lessons children are given opportunities each week to practice writing building stamina and confidence. We support children in English through the use of word banks, rehearsing  sentence structures and the use of English working walls. We also celebrate children writing as authors through writing walls within and outside of the classrooms. Children are taught grammar skills within writing lessons so those skills become embedded. We follow a progression of writing skills.

st johns writing grammar and punctuation progression.pdf

Handwriting is taught explicitly once a week using Letter-join and practiced daily, as well as when children publish their writing for display. 

Phonics and Spelling