English

Welcome to the English information page

Proverbs 25:11 “A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in settings of silver.”

English is at the core of our curriculum. We understand that a high-quality education in English allows children to develop their understanding, knowledge and skills in all areas of learning and provides a gateway to personal growth and effective participation in society. Taking into consideration our children’s starting point and background, we endeavour to provide children with a bespoke curriculum that allows for maximum language development. We aim to develop in our pupils the ability to communicate effectively in speech and writing and to listen with understanding. We aim to make them enthusiastic, fluent and responsive readers who can learn and gain pleasure from the written word. We encourage each child to reach their full potential, to value themselves, others and the world in which they live.

We hope you find the information useful.

If you have any suggestions or queries regarding this page please contact Miss L Parker (KS1 English Lead) or Miss R Sheth (KS2 English Lead)

We are striving to become a 'Reading School' and we want to promote reading at every turn! We want our children to have a real love and passion for reading at every age across school.
Please ensure that you are listening to your child read at home. They have a reading journal where you can comment and sign your name. For Key Stage 2 there are also suggested questions that you might ask your child to see if they have understood their reading book.
If you are available to help support reading in school please speak to your child’s class teacher. Many thanks for your support!
We have implemented our Spellings Scheme this year from Year 2 up to Year 6. This will ensure spelling rules are taught at appropriate stages and that progression is seamless from one year group to the next.

How can parents get involved?

Attend one of our regular workshops! (See newsletters for more information).
Enjoy a book, a comic, an online news report, a magazine with your child at home! Make it fun!
Read, read, read with your child daily!

Please find below a suggested list of books that you could read with your children for each year group. Please also note that the Blackburn central library has a fabulous range of books that the children can choose from. Do join them!

Suggested book lists

Talk for Reading

We have recently changed the way that we do guided reading in school- now we are following the Talk for Reading programme. This will give our children the opportunity to read deeper into a text thus developing their background knowledge. It enables the pupils to ask questions and encourages in-depth discussions in lessons, unpicking the texts given. It also aims to give our pupils the skills they need to be life long readers and to increase their vocabulary. There is a fluency element to 'Talk for Reading' which will help the pupils to make progress on their prosody and automaticity when reading.

The overview is as follows:

Introduction
Investigation
Independent understanding

Click on the link below for more information on the Talk 4 Reading approach:

https://www.talk4writing.com/talk-for-reading/

Writing

Talk for Writing is used across the school as a supportive framework to complement our writing curriculum. It provides consistency in how we teach writing while allowing flexibility to meet the needs of each cohort.

Each year group uses carefully selected quality texts from a range of genres, often linked to curriculum topics to ensure learning is meaningful and vocabulary-rich.

A key strength of our approach is the use of oracy and oral rehearsal to support sentence construction alongside teacher modelling and shared writing, where children see how effective writing is created and can contribute ideas in real time.

Across the school, the focus is on developing writers who can make informed choices, using taught strategies, rich vocabulary and shared models to support them as they move towards confident, independent writing.

Our approach follows these three steps for each text: