Our English offer

At Sawtry Infant School, we aim for children to:

• Develop a positive attitude and enthusiasm for English learning;
• Express themselves clearly and confidently;
• Become independent and fluent readers;
• To write for different purposes;
• To take pride in their work.

English teaching and learning is delivered daily and across the week. We provide:

• Four direct English lessons which explore key texts; children learn new vocabulary and apply this to their independent writing (see ‘English lessons & Writing’ below);
• A daily direct Phonics session, delivered using Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised (see ‘Phonics & Reading Practice’ below);
• Reading Practice sessions three times a week, enhanced with using matched decodable texts;
• A daily story time using a recommended year group text;
• Three handwriting lessons a week. 

If you wish to read further information and find support with Phonics and Early Reading, please visit our dedicated page here. 

Writing For Pleasure

Our Writing lessons learning are delivered through the supporting research from The Writing for Pleasure Centre. This approach allows children to become authors of their own texts and develops children's motivation and confidence when writing.

Children take part in two projects within a 'unit'. This consists of:

• Class Writing Project: This is the 'end product' of a unit of work that the class will be learning about (for example, writing a poem). The class focus on sharing ideas, before planning, drafting, editing and finally publishing their work. Children will learn the features of the focus text and explore Spelling, Punctuation and Grammar techniques (which we call Craft Skills). 
• Personal Writing Project: We encourage children to become life-long writers and aim for everyone to find pleasure in writing. Therefore, when children have finished their class writing project work, they can begin (or return to) their personal writing project. This is child-led and gives children an opportunity to write about anything they wish, in whatever genre or form. Children may complete a personal writing project in a single day or choose to extend their project for however long they need!

Our book corners also contain each classes 'publishing house', where fantastic personal writing projects are published and shared for all to read! Parents - please keep an eye on your class Dojo page for any publishing events you may be invited to!  

As we use the supporting documents from Writing for Pleasure to structure our Writing lessons, we also incorporate their 14 principles to promote effective teaching practice:

For more information about each of these principles, please visit the Writing for Pleasure website. 

Working at Greater Depth 

Year 1 children working at Greater Depth in writing will, after discussion with the teacher, be able to:

• begin to write effectively and coherently for different purposes
• join words and clauses with a variety of commonly used conjunctions (e.g. and, but, because)
• use capital letters and full stops mostly correctly
• spell most Y1 common exception words accurately and make phonically plausible attempts at spelling unfamiliar words
• form most letters correctly.

Year 2 children working at Greater Depth in writing will, after discussion with the teacher, be able to:

• write effectively and coherently for different purposes, drawing on their reading to inform the vocabulary and grammar of their writing
• make simple additions, revisions and proof-reading corrections to their writing
• use the punctuation taught at key stage 1 mostly correctly
• spell most common exception words
• add suffixes to spell most words correctly in their writing (e.g. –ment, –ness, –ful, –less, – ly)
• use the diagonal and horizontal strokes needed to join some letters

Handwriting

Our handwriting lessons also follow the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised programme. We address any incorrect letter formation through our next steps marking. Throughout English lessons, we embed good handwriting habits, such as learning good posture for handwriting, where to start and end each letter and how letters sit on the line correctly. We use the ‘formation phrases’ as provided by Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised. Please see these below.

Assessing English learning

• Evidence of children's work (such as writing across the curriculum) and teacher's knowledge of the children, enable teachers to input termly assessments of children's Reading and Writing. 
• For Phonics, in each year group, there is a review session which recaps and revisits previously taught learning. There are also whole review weeks; these are pre-planned and bespoke review weeks to address gaps in children’s knowledge.
• Children who are identified as in danger of falling behind in Phonics are immediately identified and daily ‘keep up’ sessions are put in place – these sessions follow the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised programme.
• In Reception and Year 1, children are assessed at the end of every half term using the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised assessment tracker. This also gives teachers guidance on the appropriate book level to allocate to individual children.
• Year 1 children complete the statutory Phonics Screening Check in the Summer term. Year 2 children who did not meet the expected standard in the Phonics Screening Check in Year will retake this in Year 2. The result of these scores are reported to parents in their child’s end of school year report.