English

Spring- 

We completed a diamond 9 of things that they loved the most about our English lessons. Here is what the children in each year group love the most:

• Year 6 - love that they get useful feedback to help improve their writing
• Year 5 - love that reading a range of books helps them in other areas of the curriculum
• Year 4 - love reading books in school
• Year 3 - love that they get useful feedback to help improve their writing
• Year 2 - love reading books in school
• Year 1 - love learning new words

WWW- 

• Texts that children are looking at in each unit are engaging and the children love them. They say that they help them with their writing and they can clearly see what their writing outcomes should be.
• Writing lessons are engaging and they enjoy writing.
• There is a wide range of books in school and they can see that reading is really important. 
• Y3 - clear impact of Fred talk on the children's understanding of reading and spelling!

EBI-

• Some of the children were unsure of the reading icons.
• More reader's theatre. 
• Sometimes the children would love to choose about what they write about.
• Children would like more time to share their writing with their peers. 

Autumn 1-

For our English curriculum champions session, we looked at writing across school  and what the children liked about writing and what they didn't like as much about writing. The discussed how writing was challenging but there were lots of things to help them and all children commented on how they thought they had got better at writing.  

The responses highlight how children across year groups appreciate imaginative and meaningful contexts for writing, value learning new skills (e.g., punctuation, vocabulary), and find enjoyment in seeing their progress. It also shows their developing awareness of different genres and the purpose of writing. We have developed some new checklists for the children to now use so that they can remember what was good about a piece of writing and what the learning was. Our focus on handwriting is really helping the children as when asked how they knew if writing was good, they all commented on how neat it was. This focus on transcription has helped children to recognise the important of handwriting and how handwriting means they can read it back, they are proud of their writing and it gives them motivation to write.

Year 1

“I like writing my sentences about what we have been doing in class. We made a picture of a troll and wrote about it. It’s fun when we write sentences together on the board, but sometimes I forget where the full stops go.”

Year 2

"I really loved writing about Mae Jemison in our book Look Up!  We practice our letters first and this helps me to remember to be neat. I wrote nearly a whole page for a diary and I was really proud of my writing."

Year 3

"Writing is hard but I really like it. We sometimes get to read it out to our class and I really like doing this because it makes me proud. I liked writing about the Seal Surfer."

Year 4

My writing has got much neater and I am writing more. We have success criteria so I don't forget my punctuation. My teacher sometimes puts work on the board, which I like because I can see what other people have written.

Year 5

I like writing different types of things. I like writing diaries the most because I can pretend to be the character. We have written some stories as well.

Year 6

I love it when we write a double page spread and we add pictures to our writing too. We have written some non fiction texts and I have written more in science and history.