English
Intent
At Parkhill Junior School, we aim to deliver a creative and inspiring curriculum that opens children’s mind to a world of imagination. By being uncompromising in our aspirations, we endeavour to promote exceptional standards and expend every child’s potential for knowledge, skills and understanding in the areas of reading, writing and articulacy.
Our aim is to equip every children with a confident command and understanding of the written and spoken word so that they are enabled to express themselves, creatively and imaginatively. We believe this encouragement will enable them to become confident, capable and enthusiastic authors, with a genuine love of writing.
At Parkhill, we aspire for every child to read widely and often; to become a critical reader and cultivate a deep appreciation and lifelong love of reading. We want our children to become both independent and reflective readers who can use their skills to access all other areas of learning
Implementation
Through our dynamic melting curriculum, we have linked together topics across subjects, to provide depth of learning. In English, high quality texts have been chosen to work alongside history topics to allow children to develop deeper contextual understanding about a historical period. They can also make comparisons to modern society
Through a high performance learning approach (HPL), staff are committed to empower all learners to achieve better than good progress across the curriculum, regardless of their starting points. Differentiation is provided through varied levels of support, rather than different activities.
By optimising learning spaces outside the classroom, we provide children with engaging activities which will promote lots of talk and discussion, in turn enhancing their use of subject specific vocabulary and academic language of learning. This will allow children to make deep and meaningful connections across the curriculum.
To ensure we are always promoting a love for reading, we have developed our own reading band called the Parkhill Reading Tree. For this, we have compiled a list of 100 books which we aspire for every child to read before they leave Year 6. Through this grassroots approach to reading, we believe that children will be able to build strong foundations throughout their time at Parkhill, which will enable them to grow as passionate readers. Each list has been carefully curated, to ensure there are books from a range of genres and diverse cultures; covering various themes, societal issues and helping build empathy towards others.
We ensure that there are robust methods in place to first, identify lower attaining pupils in reading and writing and then to support children to improve their outcomes to match that of their peers.
Impact
The impact of the English curriculum will be seen through children becoming avid readers and creative authors that have a genuine passion and find joy in the craft of writing.
Children’s writing will reflect authenticity due to their deep contextual understanding and empathy with characters. Through reading a wide range of books and exploring adventures and journeys the characters embark on, we hope that a piece of every book will forever remain with the children, as they help shape their identity and ever-growing sense of self. Children will be curious and inquisitive about the world around them and use non-fiction texts to learn more about topics that are of interest to them. A high performance learning approach will ensure that all children are supported and stretched appropriately, regardless of starting points.