Our Curriculum Principles

At The Green, our curriculum principles are the driving force behind the way we teach and the way we aspire for our children to learn. Our principles were designed by our staff and were chosen based on an excellent understanding of our community, our families and most importantly our children. 

Successful

We know that reading is the gateway to the curriculum for our children and we prioritise learning to read across school.

We understand that to feel successful as a reader, both knowledge and skills for reading need to be developed at the earliest possible stages. Our robust phonics programme, Read Write Inc, exposes our children to progressive, high-quality teaching that develops their phonetic knowledge, decoding skills and reading comprehension at a rapid rate. Phonetic knowledge and the development of early reading skills forms the building blocks for our children to become successful writers. 

Aware

We strive to enhance our children's cultural capital and knowledge of the world around them by choosing high quality texts that develop their understanding of life and culture beyond their immediate community. 

Independent

We want our children to become independent readers with clear strategies for decoding unfamiliar words. 

Through the development of their reading and comprehension, we know that children's writing improves.

Our aim is to inspire our children to write through presenting them with exciting texts and fantastic enrichment and learning opportunities. 

Language rich

Our classrooms and our curriculum are both drenched in rich and aspirational language. 

Encouraging reading for pleasure across school and prioritising the teaching of reading, our children are consistently exposed to an abundance of language. In order to access our wider curriculum and acquire important knowledge, our children are taught a wealth of vocabulary throughout all subjects. Vocabulary and language is prioritised on all of our learning walls in school and referred to throughout learning. As part of our writing sequence, developing new vocabulary is prioritised at the start of each writing genre to give our children the language they need to write a successful piece in that genre. 

How is writing taught at The Green?

At The Green, our English curriculum is designed and planned alongside our enquiry curriculum.

Reading and writing are carefully arranged and sequenced across school to ensure that our curriculum is progressive. 

We aim to immerse the children in their writing genre, which is closely woven into their learning through each termly subject driver (Autumn: Geography, Spring: History, Summer: Art). 

Key texts are specifically chosen to inspire great writing and to broaden and deepen our children's understanding of writing for a purpose. Much of our approach to the development of writing has been influenced by our work with Theresa Heathcote. Across school, children are provided with a consistent teaching sequence to writing that allows them to develop competence and understanding. This approach is based on the steps below:

To help children understand the writing process and to support reactivating prior learning, all classrooms have a consistent approach to how English lessons are displayed. We display previous learning, current learning, key vocabulary, the genre and it's purpose and an example of what a great one looks like. 

Writing Genres

What is a writing genre?

Genre is the form that a particular piece of writing takes eg: a letter, narrative, report, story, poem, newspaper. 

From Foundation through to Year 2, we aim to immerse our children in multiple different writing genres so that they experience a wealth of writing for a purpose. We want our children to see that writing is not just something that they complete and then it sits in their school books; we want them to feel that the curriculum brings alive their writing and that they are doing it for a purpose. 

We ensure that writing across school is progressive and that year on year, despite studying similar genres, the knowledge required deepens our children's understanding. 

How is handwriting taught at The Green?

Handwriting is a skill that is explicitly taught and applied across the curriculum. Children who are able to form letters and words accurately are better able to concentrate on the content of their writing (EEF Research, 2019). Our handwriting skills are taught through the Read Write Inc handwriting progression and our children are taught basic handwriting skills from foundation. 

How are spellings taught at The Green?

Spellings are taught through the Read Write Inc phonics as part of the 'get writing' stage of the lesson across school. As children progress through the banded groups for Read Write Inc, they are explicitly taught spellings that occur frequently in the story books used in the lesson.