English Curriculum

Higher Bebington Junior School
English Curriculum

English sits at the heart of our curriculum – it is through language, story and text that children learn to form concepts, connect ideas and express themselves. Through literacy, in all its forms, children learn to both make sense of the world and shape their place within it.

Reading

At Higher Bebington Junior School we have designed our own reading curriculum which uses a variety of resources and sub-programmes. First and foremost, we want all children at Higher Bebington Junior School to develop a life-long love of reading. Reading skills are predominantly taught through high-quality texts during whole class Guided Reading sessions. This is through looking at questions focusing on explanation, retrieval, inference and language choice. Children then focus on the skills of comprehension, first through unpicking vocabulary, then moving on to unlocking the meaning of whole texts.

Teachers read a huge variety of written material regularly with the children, fiction and non-fiction, stories, reports, diaries and poems. Each year group has access to a ‘Class Book Library’ containing challenging and interesting novels for teachers to read to their classes, exposing children to language and classic stories which they may find too challenging to read independently.

Writing

Writing is predominately taught through high-quality texts – ranging from picture books to Shakespeare. Over their time at the school, children will write a variety of fiction and non-fiction texts, including recounts, news reports, explanation texts, poems, plays and stories of all kinds. We use drama, role-play, storytelling and discussion to engage the imagination, before moving on to vocabulary exploration, sentence craft and creative writing. Children are taught apply their writing skills across the curriculum and to see a purpose for their writing.



Poetry

At Higher Bebington Junior School, we look at a wide range of poetry in our whole class reading sessions, writing lessons and when reading aloud for pleasure.