English

At Little Parndon Primary Academy, our English curriculum is designed with "The Little Parndon Child" and our mission of "shaping futures through education" at its core. Our curriculum is structured around carefully selected set texts for each year group, ensuring a comprehensive and enriching literary experience for all students. You can download our full English curriculum overview at the bottom of this page.

Selection Criteria for Set Texts

The texts chosen for our curriculum are selected based on the following criteria:

• Cultural Capital: Enhancing students' understanding of the world and diverse cultures.
• Challenge: Providing intellectually stimulating material to promote critical thinking.
• Vocabulary: Expanding students' language and vocabulary skills.
• Variation: Offering a diverse range of genres and styles.
• Conceptual Richness: Encouraging deep thinking through complex themes and ideas.

We regularly review our set texts to ensure our pupils are exposed to a wide array of authors, cultures, and characters, building upon their knowledge and understanding year after year.

Progression of Texts

Our approach to text selection ensures that each year builds on the previous one, enhancing students' comprehension and analytical skills - for example:

• Year 1: Aesop’s Fables - Introduces culturally important and challenging texts that teach moral lessons.
• Year 2: Winnie the Pooh - Transitions from moral lessons to themes and from fables to short stories.
• Year 3: Charlotte's Web - Develops themes of love and friendship, offering a culturally significant and challenging narrative.
• Year 4: Clockwork by Philip Pullman - Expands on previous themes while introducing contemporary writing and meta-storytelling.

This structured progression prepares our pupils to engage with increasingly complex texts, ultimately guiding them to some of the most sophisticated literature ever written.

Reading and Writing

In Key Stage 2 (KS2), our children benefit from dedicated reading and writing lessons. While these skills are interconnected, we allocate additional time to teach them explicitly, recognising their importance to wider learning.

Specific Areas of Learning

Our English curriculum focuses on the following areas:

• Language Development: We integrate spoken language, reading, writing, and vocabulary development into the teaching of every subject. Mastery of English is both an academic goal and a vital tool for accessing the entire curriculum. Fluency in English is essential for success across all subjects.
• Speaking and Listening: Pupils learn to speak clearly and confidently, justifying ideas with reasons, asking questions to check understanding, expanding vocabulary, negotiating, and evaluating ideas. They are also taught to select the appropriate register for effective communication.
• Reading and Writing: We emphasise reading fluently and understanding extended prose while encouraging reading for pleasure. Our classrooms are stocked with a variety of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry books, and we set high expectations for reading at home. Pupils develop the skills to write at length with accurate spelling, punctuation, and grammar. They are taught to produce narratives, explanations, descriptions, comparisons, summaries, and evaluations, which support their comprehension and consolidation of what they have read or heard.

At Little Parndon Primary Academy, we are dedicated to cultivating a love for literature and language in every child, equipping them with the skills they need to succeed in all areas of their education and beyond.