English Statement of Intent

Resilient          Respectful         Inspired       Curious

Readers, Writers and Speakers at Yeadon Westfield Junior School

We teach English at YWJS to empower children to be successful in every aspect of school life, by giving them the skills to read comprehensively, speak confidently and write creatively. We want our children to succeed in life and recognise that excellent language skills open the doors to great opportunities.

The overarching aim for English in the national curriculum is to promote high standards of language and literacy by equipping pupils with a strong command of the spoken and written word, and to develop their love of literature through widespread reading for enjoyment.

Readers

The children at YWJS will have excellent comprehension and de-coding skills. As readers, they will be confident, fluent and expressive and will read a variety of texts allowing them to deepen their understanding of the world and connect with the books they are reading. We want to inspire our children to become life-long lovers of reading and make informed choices about the texts they read, while being curious about new authors and appreciate our rich and varied literary heritage. We want our children to be prepared and have the reading skills they need to be successful throughout their life.

Writers

When our children leave YWJS, they will write clearly, accurately and coherently, adapting their style and language in and for a range of contexts, purposes and audiences. Children will have the spelling, punctuation and grammar skills they need to be successful and resilient writers who can confidently express, elaborate and explain themselves in a variety of different genres.

Speakers

Our children will be confident speakers and listeners, who can debate, present, question and clarify and have embedded oracy skills which allow them to contribute respectfully to discussion.

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Today, Year 3 received a message in a bottle. We opened it to discover a treasure map and a letter. We were inspired by this to create our own treasure map drawing ideas from the school grounds. We altered the names of places using alliteration for authenticity.

Purpose and audience: To narrate an adventure story in the style of The Wreck of the Zanzibar. We will read our stories to our peers during a Year 3 and 4 reading morning. 

Today we read Goldilocks and The Three Bears. We dressed up as animal characters. We all had a Goldilocks tea party tasting various different types of porridge. 

Purpose and audience: To narrate a fairy tale telling a sequence of exciting events, containing an animal character and a moral. We will read our stories to the children in Year 2 during transition day. 

Today, we immersed ourselves in the Mayan jungle as we listened to the sounds and discovered what animals lived there during the Mayan Civilisation. We imagined how we would feel travelling through the Mayan jungle using our senses. We took on the role of a variety of jungle animals and explored their environment. 

Purpose and audience: To describe a Mayan jungle animal's personality. Our poems will be sent to a local poet to be judged.  

Tragically, a few children were captured by Emperor Claudius. Year 3 and 4 children prepared questions to ask the captured slaves to find out what it was like being captured and taken away from Britannia to Rome. We then interviewed the slaves. 

Purpose and audience: To narrate a wishing tale of Deri's enslavement in Rome and his wish to return to his family in Britannia. The tale is for other children in Britannia who are at risk of being enslaved by the Romans. 

In Year 3, we made our medicinal potions using real edible ingredients we brought from home. We mixed our ingredients and ate our medicine. We brainstormed expanded noun phases, using interesting adjectives that we could add to our cauldron. 

Purpose and audience: To inform Roman physicians of how to make a wellness potion to cure Theodora. 

The children have made fairground rides for their DT topic this half term and written instructions in their English lessons on how to make them. They have written them for the current Y4 children so they have some instructions when they come to make them next year. The children explored circuit equipment and made a clown's nose light up and his bow-tie spin.

The children watched The Railway Children Return as their exciting hook into writing WW2 diary entries. The film starts as three siblings are evacuated out to the countryside during the war. Click here to watch the trailer.

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The children in Year 6 met Sven, a Viking longboat maker, who lived in the same village as Gunner (the main character in their class text Viking Boy by Tony Bradman). He told them of the attack by Skuli and his band of raiders and read them a letter his daughter had written to the neighbouring village, warning them of the attack. The children took part in some 'show, not tell' emotion activities and Sven challenged them to write their own account of the attack in the village to send to their friends to warn them.

The Year 6 children met Peggy Whitson, an astronaut from the USA. She explained that a new rocket, the Titan V was going to be sent into space to see if there is intelligent life out in the solar system. She challenged the children to create information leaflets about North America to send up with the rocket so any intelligent life could learn about the continent.