Our English Curriculum Overview:  

At Rotherfield, we want every child to be, and vitally, to see themselves as a writer, and to be able to develop their skills and understanding in a community of fellow writers. Driven by Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction, we weave the National Curriculum programmes of study into thoughtfully structured, creative, and inspiring units, which engage pupils and drive their understanding of and progress in writing. The units dig deeply into the purpose, features and impact of specific genres of writing, so children have a precise and mature understanding of the power of language and how they can use this to great effect. We prioritise pupils’ ability to understand, master, and deploy language, both in the written and spoken word.    

Intent:   

At Rotherfield, we want our children to develop the passion and master the skills that will allow them to express themselves creatively, accurately and confidently in their writing. Through daily writing opportunities, we enable them to find and build their own authorial voice, so that they can communicate effectively for a range of purposes and ensure that their writing has the intended impact on their audience. With a strong understanding of genre, children appreciate the reason behind the features and language associated with each genre and can therefore write for a clear purpose, within a consciously chosen form.   

We want to give children the power to create their own imagined worlds and the linguistic skills to navigate successfully through the real world. High quality stimuli will hook the children into their learning and a language rich environment and explicitly taught vocabulary, which is retained and used by our pupils, will ensure that we close the ‘word gap’ and give all of our children the greatest chance to thrive and flourish in their lives.   

High-quality planning, teaching, modelling and personalised feedback, allows our children to develop technical and creative skills at word, sentence and text level, as well as giving them the opportunity to reflect on their learning and take ownership over their work. Developing children’s powers of imagination, language use, inventiveness and critical awareness is at the heart of the curriculum.   

Oracy is woven through our writing curriculum so that our children are collaborative, confident and precise communicators, in their writing and their speaking.  

 

Link to Writing Policy: RF Writing Policy November 2024.docx 

Link to Writing Genres document: RF Writing genres.docx 

Unit overview: Writing Curriculum Overview for website.xlsx