English teaching at Monkston is engaging, motivating and personalised. A wide range of text types are taught across all year group to include fiction, non-fiction and poetry. In each year group, English is taught along the same structure.

• Every unit starts with a 'cold write' to assess the children's prior knowledge of the genre and to provide each child with a personal target to work on over the unit.
• Then high-quality text examples are studied to ensure all children understand the genre, as well as providing children the opportunity to gather a bank of ideas to help them improve upon their target.
• With the support of the teacher, the children plan and write their own piece of writing based on the genre, using ideas heavily modelled and guided by the teacher in an extended writing. Each child's target is then re-assessed and built on in preparation for their 'hot write'.
• Once the child has read and understood their feedback from their extended writing, they can then move onto their 'hot write', which is an independent piece of work.
• After they have written their 'hot write', they then edit and improve it into a final published version to be levelled and compared to their 'cold write'.

Technical aspects of punctuation and grammar are taught within each unit, following the school’s guidance for each year group [see below]. Spelling is taught daily in Year 2 -6 following the RWI spelling programme.

Throughout the English curriculum, pupil’s understanding of British values and global issues are capitalised on. Values are explicitly linked to specific topics such as a year 4 writing unit based on Friend or Foe, which teaches children the importance of getting to know someone before judging them and how to accept and forgive someone who is different to you. In Year 1, their topic on Traditional Tales teaches them safety messages, such as not to talk to strangers, as well as learning how to respect other people’s feelings. In year 6 they complete a unit on biographies where they are able to look at a significant person’s life in detail and discuss their background, culture and faith.

Throughout the English curriculum, we explore the different characteristics of learning and deepen the children’s understanding of being inquisitive, resilient, cooperative, creative, resourceful and reflective. In every classroom, children are challenged with targets to extend their learning. With the use of our editing pens (purple polishing pens), children are given the opportunity to reflect on their own work and consider how they can improve it. They are encouraged to use any of the resources available to them within the classroom and they are encouraged to independently choose what they want to use in order to support their own learning. Many opportunities are made for peer work and assessment in order to encourage cooperation.