Our English Curriculum
English holds a central place in education and society. Through our teaching, we help children learn to speak and write fluently, enabling them to communicate their ideas and emotions effectively while also understanding others through reading and listening. Reading, in particular, allows children to grow culturally, emotionally, intellectually, socially, and spiritually, with literature playing a key role in this development. It also enables pupils to acquire knowledge and build on what they already know. Mastering the skills of language is essential for full participation in society.
Phonics and early reading
Phonics and reading is taught every day at Someries Infant School and Early Childhood Education Centre.
In addition to a daily phonics lesson, all children receive a regular reading lesson in which they are taught the skills to read and understand what they are reading. Children also engage in regular ‘Once Upon a Time’ sessions’ sessions to develop their reading fluency.
Writing
Writing at Someries Infant School and Early Childhood Education Centre is taught through a carefully planned, cross-curricular approach that enables pupils to apply and deepen their knowledge across the curriculum. Pupils’ writing outcomes frequently reflect and incorporate the learning that has taken place throughout our Prime Learning Challenge Curriculum, providing meaningful contexts that inspire purposeful, high-quality writing while strengthening subject knowledge.
In addition to daily writing lessons, all pupils participate in daily Sentence Mastery lessons. These carefully sequenced sessions explicitly teach pupils how to construct increasingly sophisticated sentences through the systematic development of vocabulary, grammar and sentence structures. By exploring, practising and applying a wide range of sentence types, pupils develop the confidence and fluency needed to write with increasing accuracy, cohesion and effect.
All pupils in Key Stage One also receive regular discrete grammar and punctuation lessons. These sessions systematically develop pupils’ understanding of grammatical concepts and punctuation conventions, ensuring that they acquire the knowledge and skills needed to write accurately. Pupils are then given frequent opportunities to apply these skills independently within their cross-curricular writing, enabling them to embed and consolidate their learning in meaningful contexts.
Spelling is taught daily through our systematic phonics programme, ensuring that pupils develop secure knowledge of spelling patterns, common exception words and phonic strategies. During writing lessons, all pupils have access to high-quality dictionaries and thesauruses, enabling them to check spellings independently, broaden their vocabulary and make increasingly ambitious language choices.
Together, our daily writing, Sentence Mastery, and phonics lessons ensure that pupils develop the transcriptional skills, grammatical knowledge and compositional techniques required to become successful, independent writers. Frequent opportunities to plan, draft, edit and improve their work enable pupils to write confidently for a wide range of purposes and audiences while developing a genuine enjoyment of writing.
