English CurriculumAt Oakdene Primary School, our English curriculum is guided by Literacy Tree, a comprehensive and thematic approach to primary English that places children's literature at its heart.
Literacy Tree is an award-winning platform that immerses children in a rich literary world, fostering strong engagement and providing meaningful contexts for learning primary English. Through this Teach Through a Text
approach, children become critical readers and develop an understanding of audience and purpose in writing, as they encounter a wide range of significant authors and diverse texts, including fiction, non-fiction, and poetry.
As a whole-school approach, Literacy Tree ensures that children explore at least 100 literary texts and experience the works of over 75 unique and significant authors throughout their time at our school. This curriculum provides complete coverage of all National Curriculum expectations for writing composition, reading comprehension, grammar, punctuation, and vocabulary, as well as spelling. Each plan leads to purposeful application within a variety of written outcomes.
Oakdene English Curriculum Map - Whole School 25/26
At Oakdene, we aim to foster a love for writing and equip our children with the skills to express themselves creatively and effectively. Our writing curriculum follows the National Curriculum, ensuring comprehensive coverage of all aspects of writing, including transcription, composition, grammar, punctuation, and handwriting.
In the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS), we focus on developing the foundational skills that underpin successful writing. Children are introduced to mark-making, letter formation, and early sentence structure, laying the groundwork for more complex writing tasks as they progress through the school. Alongside these skills, children are taught to apply their phonic knowledge, acquired through exposure to a carefully structured and systematic phonics scheme. We follow the Read Write Inc. (RWI) Phonics programme, ensuring children have the tools to connect sounds to letters and words, forming the basis for confident and accurate writing.
Our approach to writing is rooted in engagement and inspiration. Carefully selected, high-quality texts are mapped out across the school to enthuse and motivate our children, sparking their imagination and encouraging them to write with purpose. To support this, we follow the Literacy Tree scheme for writing, which provides a structured and creative framework that aligns with our ethos of excellence and enjoyment. These units provide a range of writing opportunities with varying audiences and purposes as well as exciting discovery points to hook children into their learning.
Throughout their time at Oakdene, children are exposed to a diverse range of texts across genres, authors, and cultures. This exposure helps to enrich their vocabulary, deepen their understanding of different writing styles, and develop their ability to analyse and create compelling pieces of writing.
We are committed to nurturing confident, capable, and passionate writers who are prepared for the next stage of their learning journey.
At Oakdene, reading is central to our curriculum. We recognise the cultural, emotional, intellectual, social and spiritual development that pupils achieve through reading. Reading is the vehicle which enables pupils to both acquire knowledge and understanding as well as build upon what they already know. It is essential to the skills underpinning all aspects of communication, including spoken language and writing. Our programme of study allows pupils to develop an appreciation and love of reading across a wide range of genres as well as fiction and non-fiction. This breadth of exposure feeds children’s imaginations, allows them to step into other worlds and experiences and opens up a treasure trove of wonder and joy for curious young minds.
At Oakdene, we follow the Read Write Inc (RWInc) Phonics/Reading scheme.
Read, Write Inc is a highly successful phonics programme for children aged 4 to 7 who are learning to read and write. It teaches children how to both decode and understand written language to become confident and enthusiastic readers and writers. This is achieved by a dynamic approach to teaching phonics that is consistent across the school using the Read, Write Inc phonics resources and fully decodable reading books.
Children are grouped according to their ability in Early Years and Key Stage 1 to ensure that teaching is matched to their level. Phonics in Early Years and Key Stage 1 takes place daily.
Shared Reading forms part of the daily phonics lessons and is led by the reading teachers. Each child reads for at least 20 minutes every day, in a small group with their reading teacher. All texts are linked to the child's phonic ability. Children enjoy one focus text per week and learning activities support accurate and fluent reading to facilitate comprehension. In addition, children take fully decodable reading books home to further practice skills learnt at school. These books are matched to each child's phonics ability and are closely monitored by the reading teachers to ensure that children are reading books of an appropriate level. Books from class libraries are also taken home to foster a love of reading.
We teach the children phonics straight away in Reception. This means that they learn how to ‘read’ the (Phonemes) sounds in words and how those sounds can be written down (Graphemes). This is essential for reading, but it also helps children learn to spell well.
We teach the children simple ways of remembering these sounds and letters. Once the children have learnt to blend accurately, they start to read with fluency. This is achieved through speedy reading of individual words and repeated reads of their shared reading books. 'Tricky words' such as 'once' 'said' 'the' are not phonetically decodable and these are taught explicitly as part of the reading session.
To develop the children's love of stories, we have dedicated story time, across all Key Stages, daily. The teachers read to the children, introducing them to a variety of stories, poetry and information books - and authors. They acquire new vocabulary through teaching, which focuses on embedding new words into their autographic memory.
Children who join the School throughout the year are quickly assessed in phonics and grouped according to their ability. Children are assessed and regrouped every half term to ensure they receive the correct level of support and challenge.
Follow the link below for a guide to Read Write Inc. Phonics:
Parent guide to Read Write Inc. Phonics - Oxford Owl
Children progress from learning to read through RWInc to being taught using whole class guided reading sessions through a cycle of fiction, non-fiction and poetry/ mixed media. During this cycle, the children will immerse themselves in a fiction or non-fiction text from the successful Literacy Tree scheme. This scheme allows children to develop a wide range of skills through high quality texts. These skills include prediction, factual retrieval, inference, vocabulary, explanation, summarising and sequencing. As well as this, the children will practise and apply their reading skills through other media. This cycle ensures that the children are constantly being exposed to a range of genres and text types as well as mastering the art of answering questions linked to the text.
Children in Year 2 complete the Read Write Inc. (RWI) phonics programme, which equips them with essential decoding and comprehension skills. Once they have successfully completed this scheme, they transition to reading whole-class texts, where they develop deeper comprehension skills, fluency,
This site uses cookies that enable us to make improvements, provide relevant content, and for analytics purposes. For more details, see our Cookie Policy. By clicking Accept, you consent to our use of cookies.