English

At Bryn Offa C of E Primary School, our intent for English is to develop articulate, confident, and enthusiastic readers, writers, and communicators who can express themselves clearly and creatively. We aim to foster a lifelong love of reading and writing, providing our pupils with the tools they need to succeed across the curriculum and in life beyond school.

Children are encouraged and steered towards reading widely to develop knowledge of themselves and the world around them, establish an appreciation of reading and also to gain knowledge across the curriculum. We strive to ensure the children at Bryn Offa have the opportunity to develop culturally, emotionally, intellectually, socially and spiritually. Reading is viewed as a key skill across the curriculum so is an integral part of every child’s school day at Bryn Offa. Our reading curriculum is underpinned by VIPERS (Vocabulary, Inference, Prediction, Explanation, Retrieval, and Sequencing/Summarising), which ensures a consistent and progressive approach to reading comprehension from EYFS to Year 6. We want all children to develop fluency and comprehension skills while exploring a rich variety of texts that reflect the wider world and promote empathy, curiosity, and imagination.

In writing, we use a blended approach drawing on Pathways to Write, Talk for Writing and a Cross Curricular approach often linked to our whole class texts. These approaches provide a clear and progressive framework that builds children's skills through modelled, shared, and independent writing. We aim for all children to write with purpose, clarity, creativity, and accuracy, developing strong grammar, vocabulary, and transcription skills. Our goal is for pupils to become thoughtful and reflective writers who can plan, draft, revise, and evaluate their own work. Pupil’s writing is formally assessed half termly during moderation sessions which is used to set future interventions and targets.

We believe spoken language underpins the development of reading and writing. Therefore, we explicitly teach and model high-quality talk, encouraging all pupils to articulate ideas, clarify thinking, and engage in respectful dialogue. Key Stage One children engage in Talk-Boost sessions to develop their vocabulary whilst Key Stage 2 children are all given the opportunity to engage in Debating, taking on a number of roles and a wide range of topics.

Please visit our individual Oracy, Phonics & Spelling, Reading and Writing pages for more information.