English

At St Anthony’s we endeavour to inspire a love and appreciation of English and ensure that every child becomes a capable reader and writer and can speak clearly, fluently and confidently. This is an aim throughout all areas of the curriculum. The children use a wide range of fiction and non-fiction texts to inspire and develop their writing further. We teach basic skills and provide a rich, engaging and meaningful learning environment.   

In addition to daily English lessons, children are taught phonics and spelling rules systematically throughout Early Years and Key Stage One. At St Anthony’s we use Read Write Inc to plan and teach phonics ensuring that this is taught in a multi-sensory approach to cater for the children’s needs.   

Reading is taught through story time and phonics. Children enjoy a diverse range of age-related texts that motivate and enthuse them to read. Through daily phonics children are given access to texts that are carefully matched to their reading ability and to develop their comprehension. Each child is provided with a school reading book that is matched to their reading ability. When the children have come off the phonics scheme, they become Free Readers, and have access to choose from a range of independence books suited to their ability. These children also take part in a daily comprehension activity, focusing on building their understanding of the text. 

Please see our Reading newsletters below.

In Key Stage 2, the children continue to receive daily English lessons covering a wide range of fiction and non-fiction genres.  The children also receive spelling and grammar lessons throughout the week. The children are given strategies to become more independent writers during KS2 and the process of editing and correcting their own work with minimal teacher input is an aim. Guided Reading continues to be important and provides the children with an opportunity to work on the fluency and understanding skills they developed during KS1.  Children will also have focused comprehension lessons that reinforce and extend previous learning. 

Reading Newsletters

English in Early Years

English in Key Stage One

English in Key Stage Two

World Book Day 2024

For World Book Day this year each class took part in decorating their classroom door based on a book of their choice. This could be the book that they are reading at the moment as a class or one they have read previously. All of the work that went onto the door was produced by our very talented children. Well done St Anthony’s!

National Story Telling Week

In EYFS, we celebrated story telling week by listening to lots of our favourite stories being read by different people in our school community such as Year 4 and 6, different teachers and Elaine our Head teacher.      

English is Nursery

Nursery have been reading different fairy tales.  We have created masks and used puppets and teddies to help us role play each story.  We also wrote wanted posters for the villains in each story.

English in Reception

Burglar Bill

We always love to give children a purpose for writing and getting them excited and wanting to write. The children were shocked to find out who had entered our classroom, they looked at the evidence being carefully to write down what they could find. Some children chose to make wanted posters to tell others what had happened. We have done lots of drama activities too, asking Burglar Bill questions and creating posters to get people to watch out. Some of us even decided to be news reporters and told the world what had happened.

Phonics

We love Fred from our phonics lessons and love in child initiated play choosing lots of phonics activities.  

English in Year 4

The Day the chairs went on strike!

Our chairs went on strike! We arrived on Monday morning to a letter from our chairs telling us they’ve had enough and that we would have to complete our work without them. We worked hard to write persuasive speeches explaining to the chairs why we needed them and why we were sorry for swinging on them.