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Our curriculum
Rossett Acre’s vision for English is to engender a life-long love of language and communication through the use of purposeful teaching, using bespoke, immersive activities which inspire, interest and excite the children. This will result in motivated writers and children who enjoy reading for pleasure.
For children with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities to experience success, enjoyment and embrace learning in writing, barriers to learning and participation are removed through additional support and / or adapted provision. Please refer to our Whole School Provision Map, Our Support Strategies for Inclusive Classrooms and Inclusivity in... documents which can be found in the SEND section of our website.
To ensure consistency through school, we teach writing throughout key stage 1 and 2 using the Rossett Acre Writing Process as outlined here. It is so important to gather ideas before the writing process by reading high quality texts and extracts so that children can develop their vocabulary and writing style. Grammar and sentence structure is then taught in the drafting stage so that children focus on crafting the best sentences they can for their work.
From KS1, children are encouraged to propose changes to their writing to improve what they have written. This includes changes to vocabulary, grammar and punctuation to enhance effects and clarify meaning. Children are taught how to edit and revise work using the Cups and Arms approach. Children are also given personal targets to improve their writing; these are monitored every time children write.
Fiction, non-fiction and poetry are the stimulation for most of our writing at Rossett Acre. Children are immersed in a text and are taught key skills of grammar and sentence structure using a book based stimulus. You can see some of the books which are used in our writing lessons in the overview of writing units for Y1-6.
At Rossett Acre, children write extensively in cross-curricular activities. Children in Year 6 write biographies of Ringo Starr; Year 5 children write persuasively about current issues whilst in Year 3 children write non-chronological reports and poems about bears.
At Rossett Acre, we use Alan Peat sentences in Y1 to Y6 as tool to encourage children to use a wide variety of sentence types that are appropriate to different genres of writing. As these link directly to the grammar and punctuation objectives of the National Curriculum, they are a helpful way to help children understand and use different techniques in their own writing. Alan Peat sentences are progressive and build in difficulty, they are split into year groups to assist teachers in knowing when each sentence may be introduced. The document below shows the different sentence types introduced in each year group and the posters which are used across school to embed this knowledge.
We use the same definitions across school for grammar and punctuation to aid clarity and understanding. We have a high focus on Verbs, Adjectives and Nouns across school as the basis of the children's understanding of sentence structure.
