Manor’s English curriculum is designed to enable children to speak, read and write fluently through providing the appropriate knowledge, skills, attitudes and vocabulary. It is designed to broaden their experiences and opinions, and provide a global context for their learning. The children will be able to communicate effectively in a range of contexts and are well-prepared for the next stage of their education. Please click on the image below to view our intent and impact statement for English.
Our English approach is designed around “The Write Stuff” to bring clarity to the mechanics of writing. ‘The Write Stuff’ follows a method called ‘Sentence Stacking’ which refers to the fact that sentences are stacked together and organised to engage children with short, intensive moments of learning that they can then immediately apply to their own writing. Purposeful ‘experience’ sessions are carefully designed so that our children have the opportunity to engage in meaningful activities that will support their vocabulary and understanding of writing contexts.
The Write Stuff is based on two guiding principles; teaching sequences that slide between experience days and sentence stacking lessons. With modelling at the heart of them, the sentence stacking lessons are broken into bite-sized chunks and taught under the structural framework of The Writing Rainbow. Teachers prepare children for writing by modelling the ideas, grammar or techniques of writing. to high quality texts that stimulate quality responses to reading, high quality writing and purposeful speaking and listening opportunities. Our curriculum ensures that all children have plenty of opportunities to write for different purposes. We encourage writing through all curriculum areas and use quality reading texts to model examples of good writing. Writing is taught through a number of different strategies. We believe that children need lots of rich speaking and drama activities to give them the imagination and the experiences that will equip them to become good writers.
- Initiate section – a stimulus to capture the children’s imagination and set up a sentence.
- Model section – the teacher closely models a sentence that outlines clear writing features and techniques.
- Enable section – the children write their sentence, following the model and have the opportunity to ‘deepen the moment’ where they can explore the plot point further and demonstrate their own creative sentences using their previous learning. Children are challenged to ‘Deepen the Moment’ which requires them to independently draw upon previously learnt skills and apply them to their writing during that chunk.
There are 3 zones of writing that we encourage the children to write through.
We believe that writing is enhanced when children have good imaginations and explore language which we can remember using the FANTASTIC acronym…
In addition to this, we teach the techniques of writing which make up the the BOOMTASTICs system. This develops children’s understanding of their own writing style and voice as they develop and experiment with the varying techniques.
All good writers need the tools they need – this is where the children develop the grammatic craft of writing whereby children’s work becomes increasingly accurate and improves the impact of their written work.
English Writing Progression of Skills Document
At Manor, we have mapped out a progression of skills for each year group for English using the National Curriculum as guidance to support learning in school and at home.
Year 1 Writing | Year 2 Writing | Year 3 Writing | Year 4 Writing | Year 5 Writing | Year 6 Writing |