English Curriculum

At Applecroft, we want all our children to learn to speak, read and write fluently, with confidence and enjoyment. The literacy skills and knowledge our children learn will enable them to communicate and explore ideas, feelings and opinions in order to participate fully and richly in the world around them. The overarching aim for English is to promote high standards of language and literacy by equipping pupils to confidently use spoken and written language to communicate, and to develop their love of literature through widespread reading for enjoyment. 

Reading is at the heart of the curriculum in our school: it opens doors to lifelong learning and brings great pleasure. Through reading pupils are able to develop culturally, emotionally, intellectually, socially and spiritually. Our determination is to ensure that our pupils become successful readers early in their school journey and leave us able to read fluently, with understanding and enjoyment, to enrich their knowledge and experience. We support our children to develop a love of reading and recognise its value in their lives; we encourage them to read widely across a range of genres and throughout the curriculum so they will be able to use reading to help them learn and to ensure they are empowered both personally and in society, without barriers to their aspirations.

From the outset, phonics is taught daily and reinforced and practised through the school's reading scheme. The teaching of reading is focused on developing fluency and comprehension skills so children can become independent, engaged and critical readers. Children will be read to regularly to enrich their language and enjoyment of books, and will be encouraged to develop their own reading preferences.  Our English curriculum uses high quality and diverse texts, encompassing fiction, non-fiction and poetry, including traditional and classic texts which enable children to develop an appreciation of our rich and varied literary heritage. 

We want children to be able to write with confidence and accuracy for a variety of purposes and audiences whilst developing their own individual style. We want our children to be able to write with grammatical accuracy and be able to apply spelling patterns correctly using a neat and fluent cursive handwriting style. Spoken language underpins the development of reading and writing. At Applecroft, we aim to develop pupils' confidence and competence in spoken language and listening skills and provide opportunities for all children to enrich their vocabulary and participate in classroom discussions, assemblies and drama.

Further information about how we implement the English Curriculum can be found in our policies and in our Early Reading section.

Recommended Reading at Applecroft

We want our school to be a place where children are read to, enjoy, discuss and work with high quality books. These ‘essential reads’ would be a store of classics, creating a living library inside a child’s mind. These is our  ‘Recommended Reading’. We have provided the Pie Corbett reading spine in our classrooms so that children have access to these high quality texts.

Pie Corbett says…

Great books build the imagination. The more we read aloud expressively, and the more children are able to savour, discuss and reinterpret literature through the arts, the more memorable the characters, places and events become, building an inner world. A child who is read to will have an inner kingdom of unicorns, talking spiders and a knife that cuts into other worlds. The mind is like a ‘tardis’; it may seem small but inside there are many mansions. Each great book develops the imagination and equips the reader with language.

Great stories speak to us as individuals and some children will return to certain books again and again. Great stories also build our language because around 75 per cent of our vocabulary comes from our reading. Reading develops the ability to think in the abstract; to follow lines of thought. Schools that have a reading spine, build a common bank of stories that bind the community together. These are shared and deeply imagined common experiences.