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Our school helps us to walk with Jesus, to be the best that we can be.  Through God’s love and guidance, we create an ethos of shared endeavour, friendship and co-operation to help us flourish academically, emotionally and spiritually.

“I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” Philippians 4:13

Welcome to English at Baxenden St John’s! I am Miss Edwardson, leader of English, and I am highly passionate about providing a broad, balanced and thoroughly engaging English curriculum.

Scroll to the bottom of the page to see our English enrichment blogs.

English-Curriculum-MapDownload

English Intent at Baxenden St John’s

At Baxenden St John’s, we strive for children to be ‘Primary Literate Pupils’, able to read, write and speak fluently and confidently in order to express themselves as fully as members of society. Our children develop the powers of imagination, inventiveness and critical awareness, so that they can achieve a strong command of the English language and how to both manipulate and enjoy it.

We provide a high-quality English curriculum which cultivates a passion and enthusiasm for reading, writing and exploring and experimenting with vocabulary and a range of literature. There is also a consistent focus throughout school on topic related vocabulary so that children can develop this and use it in their own speech and future writing.

By the age of 11, we aim for our children to be able to:
• Read and write with confidence, fluency and understanding, orchestrating a range of independent strategies to self-monitor and correct.
• Have a high interest in books and read for pleasure
• Have an interest in words, their meanings; developing a growing vocabulary in spoken and written forms.
• Understand a range of text types and genres – be able to write in a variety of styles and forms appropriate to the situation.
• Be developing the powers of imagination, inventiveness and critical awareness.
• Have a suitable technical vocabulary to articulate their responses.

We Love Reading!

Reading at Baxenden is high-priority. Children are exposed to a range of reading activities at school: guided reading daily, shared class reading, independent reading and modelled reading. In addition to this, they are expected to read at home during the week.

  • Our English units and some of our topics, revolve around a core themed text.
  • We read a class novel at the end of every day
  • We have reading areas in every classroom where we can enjoy a variety of books. We include reading recommendations and activities to take part in and many of the books we study in Guided Reading are added to our class libraries for the children to read for pleasure.
  • We get lots of practice with reading through regular 1:1 reading sessions
  • Guided Reading is taught every single day
  • We make sure that reading skills are transferred to all areas of the curriculum
  • We learn phonics as soon as children arrive in Reception. We use the Red Rose Phonics Scheme and phonics is taught on a daily basis throughout KS1
  • World Book Day celebrates everything we love about reading
  • Even our lunchtimes sometimes revolve around a love of reading with our KS1 and KS2 reading groups, led by children
  • The book fayre visits school each year during the Autumn term

Phonics and Spelling

Children in Reception and Key Stage 1 follow the ‘Red Rose Letters and Sounds’ programme – a systematic and synthetic phonics scheme of work. It is an approach to teaching phonics in which individual letter or letter sounds are blended to form groups of letters or sounds, and those groups are then blended to form complete words. All children take a reading book home and home reading is encouraged daily. In KS1 the fully decodable reading books match the phase that pupils are working on. In addition, children also take home a non-decodable book to read for comprehension, and a book from the KS1 library to read for enjoyment.

Our daily phonics sessions involve lots of speaking and listening activities and games. The emphasis is on children’s active participation. The children learn to use their phonics knowledge for reading and writing activities – these are developed and reinforced in their independent work and play.

From Y3-Y6 spelling is taught daily as a whole class. Children are encouraged to use a range of strategies to learn their spelling patterns.

Phonics And Spelling OverviewDownload

Handwriting

Handwriting is a key means of communication. At Baxenden St John’s, we believe that handwriting can be an art form, an expression of personality and a way of producing work to be proud of. Handwriting is taught, enforced and praised throughout the school week.

A3-Assessment-and-Progression-in-HandwritingDownload