English

At Abbott, we understand that English has a pre-eminent place in education and in society. We provide a high-quality education in English that aims to teach each individual pupil to speak and write fluently so that they can communicate their ideas and emotions to others and through their reading and listening, others can communicate with them.

Through reading in particular, pupils have a chance to develop culturally, emotionally, intellectually, socially and spiritually.  Reading for pleasure is actively encouraged across the year groups.  The high quality literature that we use to teach English, plays a key role in such development.  Reading also enables pupils both to acquire new knowledge and to build on what they already know.  All the skills of language are essential to participating fully as a member of society; pupils are therefore taught these through both speaking and listening as well as reading and writing.   

By the end of key stage 1, children will be expected to:

• read accurately most words of two or more syllables, including words with common suffixes, and most common exception words;
• read words accurately and fluently, and sound out most unfamiliar words;
• check that their reading of a familiar book makes sense, whilst being able to answer questions and make some inferences based on what is being said or done;
• demarcate most sentences with a capital letters, and full stops (with some use of question marks and exclamation marks);
• use different types of sentences such as statements, questions exclamations and commands;
• write in past and present tense mostly correctly;
• use some expanded noun phrases;
• use connectives for co-ordination(or, and, but) and some connectives for subordination (when, if, that, because);
• segmenting spoken words into phonemes and representing these by graphemes correctly;
• spelling many common exception words, some words with contracted form, and adding suffixes to spell some words correctly;
• using the diagonal and horizontal strokes needed to join letters in some of their writing, writing capital letters and digits to the correct size, orientation and relationship to one another and to lower case letters;
• using the correct spacing between words.

By the end of key stage 2, children will be expected to:

• read age-appropriate books with confidence and fluency, whilst working out the meaning of words based on the context that it appears within a sentence;
• explain, discuss their understanding, draw inferences and make predictions based on what they have read;
• retrieve information, summarise main ideas, identify key details and use quotation from non-fiction;
• evaluate the use of author’s language, including figurative language, and state the impact that it has on the reader;
• create atmosphere, and integrate dialogue to portray characters and advance action;
• select vocabulary and grammatical structures (including adverbials within and across sentences);
• using passive and modal verbs mostly appropriately;
• using different sentence types including different clause structures;
• using adverbs, prepositional phrases and expanded noun phrases effectively to add detail;
• use inverted commas, commas for clarity, and punctuation for parenthesis mostly correctly, whilst making some correct usage of colons, semi-colons, dashes and hyphens.
• spelling most words correctly.
• maintaining legible joined handwriting with fluency and speed, choosing whether or not to join certain letters.

Other pages