Curriculum – English 2020-2021

English at Cotsford

Our school has adopted Pie Corbett’s Talk for Writing as a model to improve achievement in writing. There are three stages in ‘Talk for writing’ – imitate, innovate, invent. Movement from imitation to innovation to independent application can be adapted to suit needs of learners of any stage. The approach moves from dependence towards independence, with the teacher using shared and guided teaching to develop the ability in children to write creatively and powerfully.

English teaching throughout the school – Summer 2

English in EYFS

Reception have loved their final topic linked to the farm – the children couldn’t go to the farm so Mrs Laverick did the next best thing and brought the farm to Reception. The new arrival of the class chicks was very popular and inspired some great writing about their growth and appearance. The children completed a ‘chick diary’ and some instructions on how to wash their hands. They listened to lots of stories as usual including the Rainbow Fish and Peely Wally.

English in Year 1

Year 1 have enjoyed a journey story, about a girl who tries to take food to her Grandma’s house, but gets stopped by three animals who eat all the food! They rehearsed the text and loved acting out the story with the characters. They also created their own version of the story by changing some of the characters and animals.

English in Year 2

We have some budding environmentalists in Year 2 and 3 with this half term’s story, ‘The Tale of a Toothbrush.’ The children have become more aware about our environment and how we need to look after it. They enjoyed following Sammy’s adventure and thought about which other everyday items could be reused and turned into something else. My favourite idea was to turn an old vest into a peg bag. The children have worked hard to improve their sentences by adding detail with story openers, adjectives and adverbs. 

You can read some of our amazing stories below.

English in Year 3

Year 3’s imagination went wild this half term as they adapted the story, ‘A Papaya That Spoke’. From talking goats, to gigantic nets as well as talking gold bars the children enjoyed having fun whilst understanding inverted commas (speech marks).

The children were so grateful for the experience of another local author, especially since they were reading one of her books. Kylie Dixon inspired the children to believe in their dreams and goals as well as setting a competition to win a signed book.  

English in Year 4

The children worked hard in groups to create actions to help them remember their class story – The Boat. They created story maps to make sure we remembered the plot fully.

The children also worked with local author Kylie Dixon. She encouraged the children to never give up on her dreams and shared the story of how she became an artist before finally being able to write her first children’s book. 

English in Year 5

Throughout this half term, the children have loved reading suspense stories about magical animals and ‘things that go bump in the night’. They focused on two stories ‘Midnight fox’ by Betsy Byers and ‘Hetty’s unicorn’ by Pie Corbett. Using both of these stories, they managed to create some fantastic descriptive work using their senses.

English in Year 6

What an exciting half term – the children were engrossed with our class text ‘Alien Abduction’ and used this to inspire some truly amazing writing including some excellent story introductions and timeslip stories.

English teaching throughout the school – Summer 1

English in EYFS

What a lovely half term this has been! The children in Reception have completed some amazing stories based on the Hungry Caterpillar and Handa’s Surprise. They have even created their own stories about visiting their Mam, just like Handa when she visited her friend. They were amazing at using their phonics when they were writing, Mrs Laverick has been super proud this half term!

 

English in Year 1

What a SUPER half term Year 1 have had – the children have loved getting into the role of a superhero! They had lots of fun learning our new story and creating their own superheroes for their ‘powertastic’ stories. 

One of their favourite parts of the half term was creating a comic strip featuring their newly designed superheroes.

English in Year 2/3

The children loved reading their new story ‘The Paper Bag Princess’ by Robert Munsch and had great fun making their own paper bag princesses.

They were very lucky to have a visit from the fantastic author, Adam Bushnell. He helped the children invent new stories just like The Paper Bag Princess. The children were delighted when Adam even knighted them! So now they are a Sir or a Lady.  

They were the stars of their new stories. The children described themselves as a knight and drew their own dragons, who were the monsters in their stories. Why don’t you try to draw and describe your own dragon? Draw a Dragon – YouTube 

You can read some of our wonderful work below. 

English in Year 3

Wow! The children were in awe and wonder to have a ‘real’ author in school, especially since they were reading one of his books. Adam Bushnell inspired the children to create Greek mythical creatures and have themselves as heroes. Following on from his favourite the children continued to be budding authors and create their own mythical stories with fascinating battles!

We all know Year 3 love to talk but they have found writing speech quite difficult. They persevered adapting their work and adding adverbs to describe the way a person was speaking.  They then used these in their mythical stories. The children enjoyed writing an explanation text on ‘why they should kill their creature’. 

English in Year 4

Poppy, Waldo and the Giant, Year 4’s story, has led to some excellent pieces of writing including some lovely ideas and interesting vocabulary. The story is all about a young girl, Poppy, who sees a giant in her town and only her best friend Waldo believes her! They created story maps as a class and individually to help us tell the story and build suspense. Children also enjoyed practising writing a gripping opening for their own suspense story.

They also enjoyed a visit from author Adam Bushnell to complement their topic work. After Adam’s exciting visit the children were inspired and came away with lots of fantastic ideas for their topic writing.

English in Year 5

What an amazing half term – the children have really excelled themselves in their English. They loved reading our class text ‘Street Child’ By Berlie Doherty and were inspired to write some fantastic character descriptions and stories. 

The wonderful Adam Bushnell worked with the children to create some incredibly spooky mining ghost stories with some excellent vocabulary to develop suspense. 

Below are some examples of our fantastic spooky mining stories:

English in Year 6

The children have loved reading the text Stormbreaker by Anthony Horowitz.  They have worked on designing spy gadgets and created persuasive texts to sell new designs. They even recorded their own radio adverts!  In their writing they have learned to use quotes and how to punctuate them correctly.  They are improving their knowledge of clauses and conjunctions such as if, so and although.

English teaching throughout the school – Spring 2 – Whole school home learning (First 3 weeks)

During home learning the children focused on the gorgeous story ‘Owl Babies’ By Martin Waddell. All year groups focused on the same story and siblings worked together to complete some fantastic work. There are some fab examples below from each year group.

EYFS, Year 1 and Year 2

Year  3 and 4

Year 5 and 6

English in EYFS

What an exciting half term in Early Years! They have completed lots of activities relating to The Enormous Turnip and Owl Babies. They designed missing posters for the Owl Mother and completed story maps for the Enormous Turnip. They have made a list of the characters in the story too.

English in Year 1

It has been lovely to see the year 1 children learn their class story ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ and compare it to alternative versions such as ‘Jack and the baked beanstalk’. They loved making changes to the original story to create their own versions and had lots of fun sharing their stories with the rest of the class.

English in Year 2/3

Year 2 and 3 have made an amazing start back following lockdown. They thoroughly enjoyed, ‘The Great Kapok Tree’ and retold the new story with actions and story maps to help them remember. They used illustrations and videos from the rainforest to create fantastic descriptions of the setting including expanded noun phrases and some conjunctions. The children used, ‘The Great Kapok Tree’, to plan and write their own version and we have some lovely examples below:

They have also continued to use Vipers to develop their reading skills by focusing on one skill at a time when reading our class text ‘The Great Kapok Tree’.

English in Year 3

Children in year 3 started reading the magical book ‘Harriet’s Hare’ by Dick King Smith. They started reading it at home during lockdown and continued to enjoy the story in school. It inspired them to write time slip stories where the characters move in backwards and forwards in time.

English in Year 4

The children in year 4 loved reading their new text ‘The Iron Man’ by Ted Hughes. During home learning, some children wrote a summary of the first chapter of the story and completed reading activities. In school, they explored the story and enjoyed getting to know the characters and themes. The children found the story compelling.

English in Year 5

Year 5 were enthralled by our class novel – ‘The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’ by C S Lewis. They thoroughly enjoyed it, especially when they looked at comparisons between the book and the film.

They wrote some fantastic diary entries in character as Lucy including some truly incredible vocabulary with detail from the story. What an amazing way to return after lockdown.

English in Year 6

Year 6 have made an incredible effort with their English work since they returned from Lockdown. They focused on the story ‘Friend or Foe’ By Michael Morpurgo and focused on writing excellent diary entries and letters which really conveyed the characters’ emotional rollercoaster. Well done Year 6.

World Book Day – Home edition

World Book Day was very different this year as children joined in a home edition and they definitely did not disappoint. They received several different home learning challenges that they could choose including paint a potato, miniature art on a 2p coin and create a diarama linked to their favourite book.

English teaching throughout the school – Spring 1 – Remote Learning

English in EYFS

What a great half term Reception have had. Even though the majority of the children have been working from home they have completed some excellent work. They completed their own story maps based on the Three Billy Goats gruff. Then they thought about their likes and dislikes of different stories including the Gruffalo and Stick Man. They have done a fantastic job at using their phonics in their writing.

English in Year 1

Year 1 have worked extremely hard this half term. They started by watching the film unit Taking Flight and then looked at each character from the film and described them using interesting adjectives.

Then they looked at Little Red Riding Hood where they mapped out the story and eventually made some fab changes to their story map to create some interesting new versions.

English in Year 2

Year 2/3 watched have shown that they have super attitudes towards their English work and have created some very impressive pieces of work. They watched ‘The Way Back Home’ and created their own versions with some interesting twists.

Then, Year 2 and 3 read the story, ‘The Place of Moon and Stars’. The children listened to the new story and created story maps and puppets to help them retell it. Let’s enjoy some of their work…

English in Year 3

This half term the children in year 3 have written a detailed setting and adventure, explored their senses when writing in detail as well as create a time-slip story. The film unit this half term was ‘Tadeo Jones’ based on Indiana Jones. The children enjoyed exploring the tomb ride adventure and the different feelings the character faced throughout. They looked at ‘chatty sentence’ openers to support with their diary entry as well as the importance of chronological order.  

The children continued the Egyptian theme in the story ‘Time-slip Scarab’ where they explored the magic of going back in time to ancient Egypt. The children created story maps and added interesting vocabulary and story words.

English in Year 4

In English this half term the children began by exploring a video called The Cloudmaker. It was a story all about an old man who makes clouds and a little boy who wants to follow in his footsteps.

Then, they looked at examples of instructional texts and started thinking about what they needed to include in instructions of our own.

English in Year 5

Throughout the half term, Year 5 have completed some fantastic English work. They have used a range of different texts and films to stimulate their creativity including the story ‘Adventures of Sandy Cove and the film unit Day of the Dead.

Here is a range of impressive work that the children have created.

English in Year 6

In English this half term, Year 6 have worked on writing descriptive pieces using imaginative adjectives.  They worked on synonyms and used images as a stimulus for their descriptive writing. They also focused on newspaper articles, where they identified features of reports and learnt about how to use paragraphs correctly in both fiction and non-fiction texts. 

English teaching throughout the school – Autumn 2

English in EYFS

What an exciting half term for the children in EYFS where they have been learning the story of The Gingerbread Man. They have completed story maps and recorded some of their fantastic retells of the story. They have completed Diwali cards and Christmas cards and also a letter to Santa.

English in Year 1

The focus story for this half term was “Lila and the Secret of Rain’. The children really enjoyed looking exploring the setting from the story, Kenya. They learnt the story verbally and then added actions and created their story maps. The children ‘magpied’ some fantastic vocabulary from the story and the children and wrote their own versions.

Then the children focused on writing diary entries and wrote from the cow’s point of view.

English in Year 2

The children have really enjoyed listening to the class story ‘Pirate Blunderbeard: Worst. Movie. Ever’ by Amy Sparkes.  They have started to use Vipers to improve their reading skills. They have read ‘The Night Pirates’ to begin to practise the skills-vocabulary, infer, predict, explain, retrieve and sequence. 

The children have  focussed on ‘finding tales’ and writing good openings and endings to our stories. They started by reading, ‘The Story of Pirate Tom’. The children retold the story with actions and looked at some of the new vocabulary. They have worked hard to improve their work by using different suffixes including words ending in ‘ed’, ‘ing’ ‘er’ and ‘est’.

They started their non-fiction work by watching the Literacy Shed video, ‘Something Fishy’ and they started looking at different animals that live in the oceans. They then worked together to research one animal, the Blue Whale and write a boxing up text together. Then the children choose their own animal and used the ‘All about Animals’ database to research facts to help them write their own information text with subject specific language and conjunctions.

English in Year 3

The children were gripped by a warning tale called ‘The Canal’. In the story, the children were warned not to go to the canal by an adult because it was dangerous and looked at how the characters had to deal with the consequences. The children had fun creating their own warning tales using the same story structure.

The children also completed a video unit called ‘The Present’.  The children explored the character’s feelings during different parts of the clip. The children generated their own story about a present capturing similar experiences to the character in the original video clip. The children started to use VIPERS to develop their understanding of different texts.

English in Year 4

The children explored an exciting adventure story called Wolf Brother by Michelle Paver. They used a text based on this story called ‘Ice Forest’ to inspire their writing, and looked in detail at how to create an effective setting description with lots of suspense and action. They rehearsed the text orally, created a story map, and began editing the story to create a new adventure story. Throughout this topic, the children focused on using interesting sentence openers, extending sentences using conjunctions and including exciting vocabulary. They also looked at using commas for effect in a narrative and making sure they included all the types of punctuation needed such as exclamation marks or inverted commas for direct speech.

English in Year 5

The children voted for their story this half term and chose the story Frozen in Time by Ali Sparkes and used the model text Kidnapped.

Using the model text, the children have learnt the text using oral story telling techniques and adding actions, which focussed on openings and endings. They have worked hard to improve their vocabulary and their standard of writing this half term. They have looked at improving spelling, by revisiting previous spelling rules, punctuating speech correctly and how to use different sentence types by using subordinating clauses.

The children have started using Vipers to improve our reading skills. They read part of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets to practise the skills of vocabulary, inference, prediction, explain, retrieval and summary.

The non-fiction task was linked to Vipers reading which enabled the children to write a diary entry as a ghost. In order to do this, the children investigated the features of a diary entry and were able to use them in their writing. They also discussed how to write in the past tense and first person.

English in Year 6

The children have been learning to use subordinating and coordinating conjunctions to extend their sentences and have experimented with subordinate clauses by varying their position in sentences.

They have been looking at the features of newspaper report, using rules for speech for quotes in their own writing and can identify what is a fact and what is an opinion.

They have used a fantasy text to support their writing of a daydream diary entry where they included description of a setting.

English teaching throughout the school – Autumn 1

English in EYFS

In Early Years this term, the children enjoyed listening to a range of stories and talked about their family, likes, dislikes and friends. They have completed an action story of Mr Wiggle and Mr Waggle and enjoyed telling the story to their friends.  The children listened to The Gruffalo, Elmer, Owl Babies and Enemy Pie. They have started to recognise and write some letters with some accurate formation using our school formation rhymes. They are beginning to recognise their names and have started to attempt to write their names on labels in the classroom areas.

English in Year 1

The children have been using Talk for Writing techniques to learn and produce a meeting tale. They started by learning the model text – Sidney the Spider – then they created a new version as a class. Finally, they wrote their own version of the story, by making small changes such as character names and settings.

They also began to look at explanation texts and used a model text – How to be a Good Friend – to look at the features before writing their own.

English in Year 2

This half term, Year 2/3’s narrative work has been based on ‘The Smartest Giant in Town’. The children enjoyed listening to and retelling the story using actions. They have worked very hard to improve their sentences by making sure that they use the correct punctuation and finger spaces and are beginning to develop sentences by adding more adjectives and conjunctions like ‘and’ and ‘because’.

English in Year 3

The children explored the video ‘Wing’ which was about a character who was lonely and felt bullied and did not know how to ‘fit in’. They wrote a character description of Wing and explored how he would feel during different parts of the story. Then they explored an extract for ‘Stig in the Dump’ called ‘The ground gave way’. First they created a story map and boxed the story up to help them learn the story structure. Once the children were familiar with the story, they identified different adjectives, verbs and adverbs in the extract and used story language and drama to support their learning. After that, the children began to change parts of the story to create our own story. During this innovation stage, we explored different types of sentences and ensured we used the correct punctuation.

The children identified different paragraphs needed to produce a discussion piece of writing and used their knowledge of the Stone Age and Iron Age to put forward an opinion based on their basic rights.

English in Year 4

In English this half term the children explored the story called ‘The New Gladiator’, all about a young boy called Helix who is desperate to become a gladiator one day. They acted out the story and created actions to help them remember the order of events. Then, they created a story map to chart the journey of the story. The children also enjoyed drama activities such as hot seating and creating character profiles. Later on this half term we began to edit the story by changing specific elements and then wrote their own version. Throughout the half term the children have also practised using different sentence types, making sure we punctuate all sentences correctly and explored how to improve their writing by adding conjunctions or expanded noun phrases.

English in Year 5

This half term the children have been reading Viking boy and investigating a text called The Forest to Kaupang – based on a Pie Corbett story.  They orally rehearsed the story and added hand actions to retell the story. They have investigated the different characters portrayed in the story and took on the roles of different characters. They have focussed heavily on extending their sentences and enhancing vocabulary, ensuring that writing is interesting to read. They have looked at the structure of journey stories and used a film unit to improve understanding of what makes a good journey. They also focussed on adding adverbs to give more description to their writing. They have enjoyed debating whether a Viking should have entered Valhalla or not. The children used their ideas to inform a conscience alley drama task and decided that the Viking should not go to Valhalla. They then created a discussion text showing both arguments for and against.

English in Year 6

This half term, Year 6 have identified the features of texts and can explain what makes an effective piece of writing such as: using adjectives to describe settings or characters as well as using a range of sentence types.  They have recapped verbs, adjectives, articles and determiners and are beginning to identify and use homophones.  In reading, Year 6 have been developing their comprehension skills through inferring from pictures and short texts.

Lessons across the Key Stages support the skills of transcription and composition.

Please click the link for English National Curriculum Information.

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