English

“No matter what people tell you, words and ideas can change the world.”
[Robin Williams, in Dead Poets' Society]

Why is English important?

It’s not. It’s crucial. At St. Luke’s, we understand that English and our language are the keys to all of our understanding. In all of our learning, we have to talk through concepts and deepen our cognition through questioning, responding and thinking in our language. Speaking and listening aspects of the curriculum are vital to our children’s learning at our school, and they are given ample opportunities to rehearse these skills and perform. This happens daily in class, with talk-partners, questioning to deepen understanding and time to reflect on their ideas. Each year-group has additional opportunities throughout the year for the children to perform to the rest of the school or their families, right the way from Reception, up to Year 6. Some highlights include Reception’s seasons performance, Year 1’s Christmas service in church, Year 2’s Nativity, Year 3’s Harvest Festival, Year 4’s Easter service, Year 5’s annual West-End extravaganza, and Year 6’s two events of the Remembrance Service and their leavers’ show.

We encourage a love of broadening our vocabularies at St. Luke’s and we constantly seek to challenge our children in extending their understanding of the world. We regularly revisit language related to our topics, through the use of topic-vocabulary jars, where vocabulary is revisited so that teachers can effectively check their pupils’ understanding.

Reading is taught in a variety of ways in our school, as children progress through their learning journey. Phonics and decoding are a huge focus of the children’s school day lower down the school, using the Read, Write, Inc model of teaching. We can look back from higher up school to the start of this progression in reading, but we encourage a love of reading right throughout school, looking forward and understanding that reading is a key building block in the children’s education, even after they transition to high school. Although not always taught as a discrete lesson in high school, reading is required in lots of the children’s lessons, from history, geography, business-studies, to name but a few.

We model what a passionate reader looks like as teachers in school, further encouraging the children to make this a life-long recreational pastime. Promoting a love of reading is a priority for all teaching staff at St. Luke’s.

As well as being taught how to break down and analyse a given text, the children are read to regularly. Questions are posed to deepen the children’s interaction with a text, reflecting on why choices were made by an author or writer. Every word on the page has been put there for a specific reason and outcome. “So, why did this author make this choice?”

Alongside direct teaching of reading and modelling it to the children, in all its forms, we also have an amazingly stocked school library with over 500 high-quality books for our free-readers, to challenge them and stretch their development in reading, and this is on top of over 1000 books used before the children get to the free-reader stage. Many of our Key Stage 2 children are librarians, assisting other children in navigating this broad selection and giving recommendations to others. Our school buddy-system allows children to read to their buddies and to be read to themselves. This can happen inside a classroom or outside in our story-telling garden, mixing age-groups and allowing older children to promote a love of reading to their buddies lower down the school. At St. Luke’s, opportunities like our school library, the buddy-reading, and reading and discussing what we’ve read throughout the day, turns reading into a social activity. This really brings it to life for our children.

Our children love to write. Encouraged by reading texts that inspire them, our children can’t wait to put pen to page. We effectively teach our children the mechanics of writing with grammar, sentence structure and punctuation a large focus, but we also insist that they concentrate on the purpose of their compositions. What would they like the reader to think and feel when reading something they’ve written? The children develop this ability as they progress through school, but by using The Write Stuff philosophy, as created by Jane Considine, we are able to make this a focus even lower down the school. Teachers and support staff use excellent models of writing, very often linked to our current topics and therefore an area of learning that the children are constantly gathering knowledge and understanding about, to promote high standards of composition and inspire a passion for writing.

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