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How do we teach English?	National Curriculum	Help at Home/ Useful Links	Photos
Phonics	Scheme of Work	Subject Guidance	Class Pages

At Red Oaks, through English lessons, our children have…

• …a love of story-telling and imagination from Talk4Writing
• …experience speaking and presenting in front of others through The Oracy Project
• …access to rich texts from our Reading and Poetry Spine
• …an understanding technical language and structure for non-fiction from Grammarsaurus
• …an understanding of spelling, punctuation and grammar from our roadmaps
• …access to media through "Take one…" film, podcasts and songs
• …a global understanding of the world through our whole school global text. (Launch New Unit for Summer term 2025)

Red Oaks Reading Spine
We have a carefully chosen selection of high-quality books, which we show off in the class in their wonderfully decorated book boxes.
These are read as class readers everyday throughout the school. Download a full list of all the books here.

Writing Yearly Overview

At Red Oaks we explore writing through 3 main areas:

1. Oracy and Language (Talk4Writing – Pie Corbett, Poetry)

2. Writing for different purposes ("Take one…" Global Citizenship text)

3. Non-fiction: explain, persuade and recount (Grammarsaurus resource hub)

Talk4Writing
At Red Oaks, we believe that the best way for children to learn language and communication skills is through multi-sensory experiences. At the beginning of each large term, we launch into a Talk4Writing unit. We follow the 3 stages of Talk4Writing; imitation (learning a model text), innovation (changing the known story) and invention (creating our own independent story). Throughout the process, the children “talk it, write it and edit it”. At each stage the children are exposed to oracy skills through drama, actions and rich language. When they leave Red Oaks, they will have internalised a variety of stories off by heart and understand how to craft their own tales with rich language and a clear structure.

"Take one…"
These units are used to focus in on a stimulus in order to inspire writing for different purposes; whether that be a book, film, picture or podcast. We then use that stimulus to develop language, form, ideas and techniques to engage a variety of audiences.

Non-Fiction
At Red Oaks, we learn non-fiction writing skills through the use of ambitious model texts taken from "Grammarsaurus". We teach children the different features and styles of each new genre and help them understand how to apply their knowledge of spelling, punctuation and grammar in order to persuade, explain, discuss, inform and recount information.

Spelling and grammar
As well as daily English lessons we also teach discrete spelling and grammar sessions. We teach the spelling patterns for each year group, which are outlined in the NC Appendix1. Grammar is taught in context through rich texts, which helps children put into practice the punctuation and grammar rules outlined in NC Appendix 2 into context. Spellings are sent home weekly from Y1-Y6 to support the statutory/common exception words.

Phonics
We follow our own bespoke phonics roadmaps for progression and coverage using visual phonics and Supersonic Phonic Friends as a hook for the children. Phonics is taught daily in EYFS and KS1 building up to an hour of phonics teaching by the end of Reception. Weekly assessment will show the children who are emerging, developing or secure in each phase. This will allow teachers to refer to the phonics road map where 'booster groups' (interventions) are mapped out.

Daily Guided Reading
2. During guided reading, children have access to a variety of text types, including but not limited to poetry, classic children's literature, non-fiction texts and 'Red Oaks' Reading Spine' books, which are in-line with and slightly above their reading ability. Reading ability is tracked using the Oxford Reading Tree bands, phonics screening and PM Benchmarking. As children progress through reading skills, the main focus of guided reading changes from decoding to developing comprehension skills and higher order reading skills.

Sessions last 20-30 minutes and are designed to teach the children specific reading skills linked to the Reading Assessment Framework. The majority of lessons will be whole class teaching with opportunities for individual comprehension, test techniques and individual readers. Teachers use the DERIC (decode, explain, retrieve, interpret, choice) reading approach, which is linked to the RAFs, to teach the children a skill.

We also run fortnightly buddy reading sessions, where children of different ages are able to share books together.

Our extensive school libraries allow the children access to a wide range of genres. These are predominantly Oxford Reading Tree schemes with a variety of authors in our KS2 library.