English sits at the heart of our curriculum. We believe strongly that it is through language, story and text that children learn to form concepts, connect ideas and express themselves. Through all forms of literacy, children learn to make sense of the world and shape their place within it.
Across both writing and reading, we place a heavy emphasis on developing a child’s vocabulary. By the time children leave Riversdale Primary School in Year 6, the limited word supply they arrived with in Reception will have expanded enormously, giving them the language that they need to understand sophisticated texts and express themselves in a wide range of contexts.
Alongside our curriculum, we take many opportunities to develop a love of reading and writing for pleasure and hold an annual writing competition, have regular author visits, hold books fairs or book swaps, and World Book Day is one of the highlights of the year! Please see how the different strands of English are taught across the school below.
Writing
In September 2024, the school adopted The Write Stuff approach to teaching writing. The Write Stuff is not a scheme; it is a way to liberate learners so that they have a complete set of tools and structures that can be applied to their writing in all contexts. The system arms both teachers and pupils with the knowledge and understanding of what to write and how to write. Grammar, writing techniques and ideas are embedded in every single lesson, and revisited again and again to ensure that pupils become confident and adept writers.
Over their time at the school, children will write a variety of fiction, non-fiction and poetry pieces. To facilitate this, we use high-quality stimuli, including images, music, short film clips, picture books and longer texts, which are used to engage the imagination, before moving on to vocabulary exploration, sentence craft and creative writing. Pupils also undertake immersive experience lessons, including school trips, aimed at developing a wide vocabulary bank and a deeper understanding of related concepts that will act as a foundation for the writing process.
Throughout the Early Years and Key Stage 1 children are taught the key principles of writing in order to lay a solid foundation for developing their skills later on. An emphasis is placed on developing clear handwriting with ‘finger spaces’ between in each word. Children are taught to apply their knowledge of phonics to help them spell accurately, and to structure their work, whether it be fiction writing or a set of instructions. Our curriculum teaches the children to focus on the audience and purpose of their writing, carefully selecting writing strategies that suit these. In addition, children are taught to add variation and description to their work by developing their vocabulary, including the use of interesting adjectives and adverbs and developing sentence structure using conjunctions and sentence openers. By the end of Key Stage 1 children have been taught the fundamentals of punctuation and grammar. This structural and technical knowledge is fostered alongside developing a love for writing as a lifelong means for communication and expressing oneself.
Children regularly apply their writing skills across the curriculum: writing up experiments in Science, recounting events in History and describing processes in Geography, for example.
Handwriting, Spelling and Grammar
At Riversdale Primary School, we teach the children the Jarman handwriting script. Handwriting is taught weekly from Reception to Year 6, beginning with mark making and patterns in Early Years all the way up to legible, joined handwriting in Year 6. When a child is deemed to have legible, joined writing they are awarded a pen licence to display on their desk with pride.
Spelling is taught from Reception. In Reception, Years 1 and 2, the pupils learn spellings as part of their Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised scheme, focusing on words using the phoneme/grapheme being taught as well as some "tricky words". When the children move into Year 3 (and above) pupils are explicitly taught spelling patterns through daily micro-teaches and activities.
When children leave Riversdale Primary School, they consider themselves to be skilled writers, confident in their ability to express themselves through language.
Curriculum Policies
Please find our English policies below:
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