Primary English Reimagined
We need to reimagine how we teach and organise the English curriculum.
It’s 2017 and most schools still have an approach rooted in the previous National Curriculum. We use structures like ‘genre units’ which lead to missing opportunities in engaging children with reading and writing. There are big question marks over the continued unquestioned widespread use of National Numeracy Strategy tools like guided reading.
So here is my proposal. Let’s engage our children in high quality books. Let’s immerse them in vocabulary so that language itself becomes exciting for them to discuss and play around with. Let’s give them a real audience and purpose for writing. Let’s use those same high quality books to model year group writing objectives in context. Let’s create structures for English lessons that actually impact on learning. Let’s reimagine the Primary English Curriculum.
So, if the starting point is a book centric curriculum rather than a genre unit based curriculum, there needs to be a level of knowledge in order to not just choose the books but know them well enough to suggest ways they can be used appropriately to support the objectives in that particular year group. Which, dear friends, is where we can help each other.
If any of the above sounds interesting at all, or perhaps you have already begun moving in this direction, then let’s pool our relative strengths together and collaborate to create something infinately better than we can do as individuals, individual schools or as clusters of schools.
