English

English at Darnhall Primary School

At Darnhall Primary School, the development of English skills is crucial to all areas of the curriculum. We believe good literacy skills are the fundamental building blocks towards academic and social success.

Ready Steady Write

At Darnhall Primary School, we are proud to use the Ready Steady Write scheme, developed by Literacy Counts, to help our children become confident, creative, and capable writers. This structured program is designed specifically for primary-aged children and supports their writing development in an engaging and purposeful way.

What is Ready Steady Write?

Ready Steady Write is a carefully designed framework that builds writing skills step by step, helping children progress from basic sentence writing to more complex compositions. It integrates seamlessly with the National Curriculum, ensuring your child learns key skills such as spelling, grammar, punctuation, and composition in a way that is both enjoyable and educational.

How Does the Scheme Work?

1. Clear Progression: The scheme is structured to ensure children build on their writing skills year by year, with age-appropriate goals.

2. Inspiring Ideas: Each unit is built around exciting themes, texts, and topics to inspire creativity and keep children engaged.

3. Building Confidence: Activities are designed to make writing accessible to all, helping children grow their confidence and independence in expressing themselves.

4. Developing Core Skills: The program includes a focus on grammar, punctuation, and spelling, ensuring that children develop a strong technical foundation alongside their creativity.

Pathways to Read

We follow a Mastery approach to English through the programme Pathways to Read. Units of work are delivered using high-quality texts and children in all year groups are given varied opportunities for reading. Skills are built up through repetition within the units, and children apply these skills in the reading activities provided.

We deliver one whole class shared reading lesson per week from years 2-6 with bespoke grouped reading for every pupil at least once a week as well as individual reading. For pupils still needing support with phonics from years 2-6, we provide an individual reading programme that has phonically decodable texts at the heart of it. In our shared and grouped reads, there is a clear teaching focus with the opportunity to master key reading skills in each session. There are follow on reading tasks to enable pupils to evidence the skills they have mastered independently.

Many opportunities for widening children’s vocabulary are given through the Pathways to Read approach and this builds on the extensive work we do in school to provide our children with a rich and varied vocabulary.

You will find the end of year expectations for reading for each of our year groups in the attached documents. For further detail on the skills that your children are learning on a termly basis, please contact your class teacher.

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SPaG

At Darnhall Primary School, we aim to achieve proficiency in spelling, punctuation and grammar (SPaG). Each week, classes promote the learning of spellings, including statutory words, common exception words and the national spelling rules through the no-nonsense spelling scheme. We believe that the teaching of spelling, grammar and punctuation enables children to be able to maximise their potential in reading and writing.

SPaG lessons are embedded throughout the Ready Steady Write planning and they will be implementeddaily through the sentence accuracy starters.

Files to Download

English Terminology for Parents P2R website skills.pdf Overview of objectives Y4.pdf Overview of objectives Y6.pdf Overview of objectives Y5.pdf Overview of objectives EYFS.pdf Overview of objectives Y2.pdf Overview of objectives Y3.pdf Overview of objectives Y1.pdf