English - Horizons Specialist Academy Trust
Our vision at Green Gates is to, ‘Strive, Believe and Achieve’. This theme runs throughout our English curriculum.
The teaching of reading and writing at Green Gates has been designed with the intention of creating a love of learning in these core subjects. Our aim is for every pupil who attends Green Gates to develop a passion for reading and writing regardless of age and ability. Every child at Green Gates has a bespoke intervention package addressing their individual needs that is implemented at intervals throughout the school day in order to build confidence and resilience across the curriculum.
Our phonic teaching is underpinned by the Little Wandle programme, all pupils are assessed as to their prior phonics knowledge and where required will receive intervention through the rapid catch up programme.
Reading is at the heart of our curriculum. We develop fluency in reading through a Daily Supported Reading lesson that allows pupils to build upon prior skills and develop new ones. Green Gates Academy follows the Oxford Reading Tree progressive scheme to develop early reading and comprehension skills. At Green Gates we encourage reading for pleasure, each of our class groups has a daily ‘story time’ It is important to us that our children are given the time within our curriculum to share a story with both peers and staff.
Please refer to our reading intent, implementation, impact statement.
Please refer to our writing intent, implementation, impact statement.
At Green Gates Academy we strive to ensure that our children develop a love for the English language in its written and spoken forms. We are committed to delivering a broad and engaging curriculum in order to enable our pupils to become confident, independent and effective speakers, listeners, readers and writers.
We aim to provide an environment for language development that is stimulating and characterized by high expectations of success. Our learning environments are designed to provide exciting areas to allow our children to become immersed in their creative writing. Work is celebrated in every school display and through weekly celebration assemblies. Our English curriculum is enhanced by:
- exciting and carefully chosen reading materials to encourage our children to develop a love of reading;
- working walls which reflect and support strands of English being taught;
- use of a wide range of high-quality materials to support effective teaching and learning;
- high quality staff training that equips our staff to deliver high quality English lessons to all children regardless of any barriers to learning identified in EHCP plans
We have developed our English curriculum and we have been focusing on high quality texts recommended by Pie Corbett (https://www.scholastic.co.uk/piecorbett/resources). We have also added texts to create an exciting Literature Spine.
Our staff team use ‘Talk for Writing’ to enhance the teaching of the English curriculum and support pupils who may find reading and writing more challenging.