English lessons are taught every day at Hollywood. Every week there are 3 ‘warm up’ sessions, which are approximately 10 minutes. The warm-up covers SPAG (spelling, grammar and punctuation) objectives and basic skills.
English lessons teach key reading, writing, SPAG and handwriting skills and objectives. Lessons are divided up into units of work, which are approximately 2-3 weeks. These units cover different genres of fiction and non-fiction.
During these units, the children will read examples of the genres, discuss the genres, analyse the structure and content and write in the style of the genre. The teacher will model writing with the children, share and guide children in writing and plan for independent written tasks. As part of the units, the children learn handwriting, grammar, spelling and punctuation skills too.
Children are expected to write every day in school and will be provided with the opportunity to complete at least one piece of extended writing every 2 weeks in the English lesson.
Opportunities for writing and developing writing skills extend across the whole curriculum. Children will be provided with opportunities to consolidate and extend their writing skills in other curriculum areas, including Science, Topic, RE and Computing.
Handwriting at Hollywood is cursive. Children from Reception up to Year 6 are taught to write in the cursive style. Handwriting is taught both as a stand-alone session as well as integrated into writing lessons.
Every two weeks children have a grammar-based lesson where they practise and embed the grammar skills they are taught.
Spelling is taught 3 per week and is based on Nelson Spelling resources for year 1, which is completely matched to Letters and Sounds, and Read, Write Inc spelling resources for years 2 to 6. Year 2 have 5 spelling sessions per week and all other groups have 3 sessions.
