Intent

At Emsworth Primary School, we believe that a love of reading will inspire a love of writing. This is why we aim to ensure that our children are introduced to a wide range of high quality texts in both our English lessons and during guided reading. This emphasis on the use of rich texts is at the heart of our teaching and learning in English and is reflected in our carefully planned learning journeys. These are crafted to provide opportunities for children to develop their vocabulary, make connections to their reading and apply their language skills to write for real purposes.

We also recognise the importance of developing children’s spoken language and strongly believe that this underpins the development of reading and writing. At Emsworth Primary School, we strive to provide meaningful opportunities for talk in the classroom. Through discussions, drama and immersion into rich texts, the children are equipped with rich and varied language that they can use in order to communicate effectively and confidently. We aim to equip our children with the vocabulary and the skills to ask questions; continue to develop their vocabulary and refine their language choices before applying this in their writing.

Our English curriculum supports and challenges the children in becoming confident and enthusiastic writers who are able to articulate their thoughts, feelings and ideas in a variety of ways and for a range of purposes. We want them to take pride in their writing, be able to demonstrate the progress that they have made and go on to apply their literacy skills across the wider curriculum.

Implementation

Our learning journeys develop the children’s skills through a combination of three phases. The culmination of these lead children to create high quality written outcomes which link to an over-arching theme or unit of work. Our aim is for the children to take pride in their writing and we feel that our learning journeys provide an opportunity for them to demonstrate our core values – Enjoy, Persevere, Succeed – as they work through the process of planning, editing, refining and proof-reading their final written outcomes.

Each learning journey begins with a 'stimulate and generate' phase. At this stage, children are hooked in by images, props, visits, visitors, video clips and immersion into rich texts which link to other areas of the curriculum. Spoken language is developed through discussion, drama and oral rehearsal and through making links to personal experiences and cross-curricular learning. Purposeful links to texts shared during guided reading provide an additional opportunity for the children to make relevant links and broaden their vocabulary further.

The second phase of the learning journey provides opportunities for the children to explore rich texts in more depth and to 'capture, sift and sort' language, structures and grammatical features of high quality model texts. At this stage, children are given opportunities to hone new knowledge and skills through directed tasks as well as through modelled and apprentice writes. We ensure that the children are appropriately supported and challenged at this crucial stage in a variety of ways: through investigating and experimenting with core structures and grammatical features; carefully modelling how to apply these to new contexts and providing scaffolds as children practise them independently. The exploration of these model texts also allows children to generate success criteria, which can then be used for support during the final stage of the learning journey.

Finally, we move onto the 'creating and refining' stage of the learning journey. This is when children are expected to apply their acquired knowledge and skills through planning and creating their own writing outcomes.  At this stage, children will refer back to modelled and apprentice writes and continue to draw on their knowledge of the model texts in order to support them with their independent writing. Throughout this stage, the children are given opportunities to evaluate the effectiveness of their writing through peer and self-assessment. They are also encouraged to access a range of resources to support technical accuracy in spelling and to support them when proof-reading and editing their writing.

Impact

As a result of our carefully planned learning journeys, the children are able to select high-level language and rehearse grammatical elements of writing before integrating them into their final writing outcomes.  They make meaningful links to their learning in other areas of the curriculum and can apply the skills they have learnt when reading and writing in other subjects.

As children progress through the school, they are increasingly able to make decisions about how best to publish and present their work. These published outcomes are celebrated across the school through our displays and children feel proud to share their learning with others. The children are always especially excited to be rewarded with a Headteacher's sticker when they visit to share their writing and photographs of these moments are shared with parents via our newsletters.

Our English curriculum 

In order to ensure that our curriculum is tailored to the children, we like to regularly review the texts and experiences that inspire our learning journeys. Please click on the link to see our current long term map for English.

EPS English Overview

Celebrating the children's writing 

Below you will find a selection of published pieces of writing from across the school. The children love to see their work on display and take great pride in publishing some of their written outcomes.