English

Here at St Paul’s, English is taught in an innovative, creative and interactive way. We aim to engage, inspire and challenge pupils. We follow the New National Curriculum and we continually adapt and revamp our plans. The English Curriculum covers Reading, Writing, Grammar, Punctuation, Spelling, Speaking and Listening, Presenting and Drama.

    • All children should be able to read easily, fluently and with good understanding
    • All children should develop the habit of reading widely and often, for both pleasure and information
    • All children should acquire a wide vocabulary, an understanding of grammar and knowledge of linguistic conventions for reading, writing and spoken language
    • All children should appreciate our rich and varied literary heritage
    • All children should write clearly, accurately and coherently, adapting their language and style in and for a range of contexts, purposes and audiences
    • All children should use discussion in order to learn; they should be able to elaborate and explain clearly their understanding and ideas
    • All children are competent in the arts of speaking and listening, making formal presentations, demonstrating to others and participating in debate and drama activities.

We want all of our children to leave St Paul’s equipped with the essential reading, writing, speaking and listening skills, as well as a love of books and language.

“I like English because we always do something different. Sometimes we do drama like when we did a unit on Odysseus, and acted out the different scenes in front of the class.”

“I like English because you get to make your own stories and you get to make whatever you want and share them to different classes.”

“I loved the unit on Beowolf when we described when we first saw Grendel because it was fun to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes when it’s something we’re not going to be able to experience.”

English Curriculum Documents

English Across the School

Reception

In Reception, the children lead their learning and may choose to write about a number of subjects. The children have access to a range of stories and books and enjoy listening to Helicopter Stories read by the teachers. They also work hard learning their phonics each day.

Have a look at some examples of our excellent learning below!

Year 1

In Year 1 this year, we have been writing sentences. We have learnt about word classes and we have explored different ways in which we could be descriptive by using adjectives, verbs and adverbs. We have also thought about our senses and we wrote our own Spring poems.

We have studied a range of different fiction and non-fiction texts and have started to sequence our sentences to create our own narratives. We have been working really hard on our hand writing and remembering our capital letters, finger spaces and full stops just like real authors. Finally, we have learnt lots of drama techniques such as freeze frames to support our writing.

Year 4

MOUSE, SNAKE, BIRD, WOLF is one of our Power of Reading unseen texts. We used discussion and drama to support our understanding of the meaning of the text. We used art and natural sculpture as a stimulus for writing our own version of the story.

We also studied The Tempest by William Shakespeare. We used drama to act out character motives, emotions and feelings. We then created our own spells, artwork and diary entries.

Year 5

Year 5 study a variety of texts in English including Macbeth, Roald Dahl, Varmints, Just So stories and The Journey. We have used a range of drama, story telling, performance poetry, debates and artwork to inspire our writing this year.

When studying Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories, we decided to retell some of the stories to Reception. We looked at How the Whale Got His Throat, How the Camel Got His Humps and How the Leopard Got His Spots. We took the magic 'ingredients' that make these stories so much fun and decided to act them out using story stones. We then wrote our own versions of a Just So story such as How The Snail Got His Shell and How The Lion Got His Mane.

Year 6

In Year 6 we use a range of texts and films to inspire our reading and writing. This includes film units such as Alma, parodies of the Three Little Pigs, explanation texts such as 'How a Teenager Really Works', Non-fiction texts based on Shackleton's Journey and Letters from The Lighthouse linked to our topic on The Second World War.

Here are some photos of us interviewing crewmates for Shackleton's expedition to the heart of Antarctica - a place of ferocious seas, uncharted mountains and bone-chilling cold!