English

At Ashlands Primary School, we have a real passion for English and, in particular, books! We are strong advocates of reading and use high quality texts as the basis for our writing in school.

English, communication and languages lie at the heart of our capacity to explore, imagine, think and create and make a crucial contribution to children’s development as successful learners.  Their developing use of language underpins children’s achievement across the curriculum and sets the foundations for lifelong learning.

Writing

Our book-based curriculum excites and engages children to be critical readers whilst becoming confident and informed writers. The texts chosen are from a wide range of high-quality authors and genres making meaningful cross curricular links. 

National Curriculum requirements are embedded, making the grammar purposeful and there is always a mixture of shorter, longer and extended writing outcomes where the audience and purpose is clear, engaging and exciting.  Our children become increasingly fluent and accurate in expressing their thoughts and emotions, orally and in writing and develop skills in editing and improving their own work. 

Reading

We aim to excite and engage every child in reading by fostering a lifelong love of books.  We use a ‘phonics first’ approach to reading, and we use fully matched phonetically decodable books as the children progress through as early readers. Once children progress beyond decodable texts, they move onto our book scheme so that they can continue to progress in their decoding, fluency and comprehension skills to become enthusiastic and competent readers.